"This work demonstrates that large quantities of water are created as a natural consequence of planet formation. It represents a major step forward in how we think about the search for distant worlds ...

A distant star system with four super-sized gas giants has revealed a surprise. Thanks to JWST’s powerful vision, astronomers detected sulfur in their atmospheres — a chemical clue that they formed ...

Planets go through different life stages: They form, evolve and eventually meet an end. But the timelines for these processes differ widely between Earth-like planets and worlds that orbit ...

An artist's impression of the planetary system surrounding LHS 1903, a small red dwarf star cooler and dimmer than our Sun. (European Space Agency) (CN) — For decades, astronomers thought they had ...

One way gas giants form is through core accretion, where solid cores gradually grow in a disk by pulling in rocky and icy pebbles until they become massive enough to attract the gas that surrounds ...

Mimicking the chemistry of outer space to explain how planets form The laws of chemistry get pushed to the limits in Jenny Bergner’s astrochemistry lab at the University of California, Berkeley, where ...

Researchers have discovered more than 6,000 exoplanets in our Milky Way. Of these, the sub-Neptune class, which are smaller than Neptune and more massive than Earth, are the most common. These planets ...

Gas giants are large planets mostly composed of helium and/or hydrogen. Although these planets have dense cores, they don't have hard surfaces. Jupiter and Saturn are the gas giants in our solar ...