When a distant planet appears as a point of light in a telescope, it's hard to imagine what things are like at the surface. Does rain fall? Is the atmosphere thick, or dissipating into space? How ...

For years, astronomers have celebrated every hint of an ocean on a distant world as a potential foothold for life. Now a new wave of modeling argues that most of those supposed seas are illusions, and ...

Astronomers have spent the past decade cataloguing thousands of planets beyond the solar system, many of them falling into a ...

A highly stylized rendition of our solar system NASA/JPL If someone asked which planet was closest to Earth, you’d be pretty certain — it’s Venus. We measure distances in the solar system in terms of ...

The universe, as Douglas Adams so memorably explained, is big. Really big. But so are the things inside it -- even objects like the Solar System, which on a galactic scale are absolutely minuscule. A ...

While most planets that we are familiar with stick relatively close to their host star in a predictable orbit, some planets seem to have been knocked out of their orbits, floating through space free ...