Giant planets up to ten times the mass of the Earth can form around violent supermassive black holes without the need for stars, according to research accepted into The Astrophysical Journal. "With the right conditions, planets could be formed even in harsh environments, such as around a black hole," Keiichi Wada, first author …

When a star dies, destroying so much around it, it’s the small, dense rocky planets that are the objects most likely to be left standing while the heavy, gassy planets crumble and perish. A team of astrophysicists came to this conclusion after modeling the tidal interactions between a white dwarf star and a nearby planet to …

The discovery of two oddball brown dwarfs orbiting a giant orange star has reignited the question of whether brown dwarfs are feeble stars or bloated planets. V Ophiuchi (pronounced Nu Ophiuchi) is a large, cool K-type star surrounded by two brown dwarfs. One is 22.2 times the mass of Jupiter, and the other is even heavier at …

Machine-learning algorithms have been used to uncover two previously unseen exoplanets in the archive of data amassed by NASA’s retired Kepler space telescope. Launched in 2009, Kepler was sent to survey the dark reaches of the Milky Way. Its job was to hunt for alien worlds by scrutinizing the light emitted by faraway stars. …

If, like us, you're dying to get off this ridiculous little rock, here's some hope* to cling onto. There’s a planetary system slowly forming about 470 light years away from Earth that looks uncannily like our Solar System in its younger days. An image taken by the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), an …

Boffins bored of time-consuming mathematics are turning to machine-learning code to predict the mass of exoplanets that aren't yet fully formed. Budding planets are difficult to study. They grow in circumstellar disks by accreting mass and are shrouded by envelopes of gas. The final mass is predicted by guessing the planet’s …

The Carnegie Institution for Science, a research hub headquartered in America's capital, is asking for the public’s help to name five of Jupiter’s newly discovered moons. A team of astronomers discovered twelve satellites orbiting the gas giant last year. As the most massive planet in the Solar System, Jupiter has the largest …

Astronomers have found the first example of a protoplanetary disk forming at a right angle to its parent stars, according to a paper published in Nature Astronomy this week. The HD 98800 system, located about 150 light years away, has been known for while. For years, its most distinguishing feature to Earth-based boffins was …

A planet three times the size of Earth has been spotted orbiting Barnard's Star, one of the closest suns to our Solar System. Various science-fiction authors – notably Douglas Adams, Arthur C. Clarke and Michael Moorcock – have written about an alien world around Barnard's Star, which at six light years away is relatively …

Scientists believe they have captured direct evidence of a star feasting on its own planets for the first time. RW Aur, a binary star system located in the Auriga constellation 450 light years from Earth, has long puzzled astronomers. The light from one of its stars, RW Aur A, repeatedly dims and flickers back to life every …

Scientists have found a trio of baby planets using a new technique of spotting unusual gas motion around developing stars. The new technique described in a pair of papers in the Astrophysical Journal Letters. It’s the first time it’s been used to find planets and has spotted three around the newborn star codenamed HD163296. …

A team of scientists have identified two out of the seven planets in the Trappist-1 system as the most likely to be habitable, according to a new study. Since its discovery, announced earlier last year, the Trappist-1 system has been of great interest to astronomers – and anyone else sick of Earth, to be honest. A previous …

The official definition of a planet should be updated to include an upper mass limit, so scientists can agree on whether a large newly found celestial body is either a huge planet – or a tiny failed star. That's according to Kevin Schlaufman, an assistant professor of astrophysics at Johns Hopkins University in Maryland, US. …

PicScientists have discovered a new “monster” alien world that challenges today's theories about planet formation due to its sheer size. The giant, known as NGTS-1b, is 600 light years away and is the biggest planet compared to the size of its parent star NGTS-1 ever found. NGTS-1b is a hot Jupiter, a rare class of exoplanet. …

Pics and videoNASA has discovered a mini solar system of seven Earth-sized planets orbiting a small cool dwarf star, including three within the Goldilocks zone where liquid water is possible. Last year, a telescope in Chile – dubbed the TRAPPIST aka the TRAnsiting Planets and PlanetesImals Small Telescope – spotted two planets orbiting an …

The ongoing argument over whether Pluto is an actual planet or just a dwarf on the outskirts of the Solar System has heated up again – with a new proposal to reapply planetary status to the distant iceball. In a vote in 2006, the International Astronomical Union (IAU) decided to reduce the status of Pluto to that of a dwarf …

A newly discovered planet is wedged in-between three stars and experiences triple sunrises and sunsets every day, according to new research published in Science. The planet, HD 131399Ab, is 340 light years away from Earth and can be found in Centaurus constellation – one of the largest constellations in the sky. "HD 131399Ab …

A team of astronomers led by NASA have discovered the largest circumbinary planet on record, according to the American Astronomical Society. The research has been accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journal with Veselin Kostov, a NASA Goddard postdoctoral fellow, as lead author. Circumbinary planets are sometimes …