Planets
The Giant Planets Migrated Between 60-100 Million Years After the Solar System Formed
Untangling what happened in our Solar System tens or hundreds of millions of years ago is challenging. Millions of objects…
Where Are All These Rogue Planets Coming From?
There's a population of planets that drifts through space untethered to any stars. They're called rogue planets or free-floating planets…
One in Twelve Stars Ate a Planet
That stars can eat planets is axiomatic. If a small enough planet gets too close to a large enough star,…
Improving a 1960s Plan to Explore the Giant Planets
In the 1960s, NASA engineers developed a series of small lifting-body aircraft that could be dropped into the atmosphere of…
Radio Telescope Confirms Free-Floating Binary Planets in the Orion Nebula
Planets orbit stars. That's axiomatic. Or at least it was until astronomers started finding rogue planets, also called free-floating planets…
Diamond Rain on Ice Giants Could Influence Their Magnetic Fields
Imagine Jupiter with a diamond core the size of Earth. That's what science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke described in…
Planetary Surfaces: Why study them? Can they help us find life elsewhere?
Universe Today recently explored the importance of studying impact craters and what they can teach us about finding life beyond…
Three Iron Rings Around A Star Show Where Planets are Forming
Researchers using the ESO's Very Large Telescope Interferometer (VLTI) have found three iron rings around a young star about 500…
It Doesn’t Take Much to Get Tilted Planets
Chinese and Indian astronomers were the first to measure Earth's axial tilt accurately, and they did it about 3,000 years…
ALMA Takes Next-Level Images of a Protoplanetary Disk
The ESO's Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) is perched high in the Chilean Andes. ALMA is made of 66 high-precision…