In the Star Wars movies fictional planets are covered with forests, oceans, deserts, and volcanoes. But new models from a team of MIT, NASA, and Carnegie scientists begin to describe an even wider ...

Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. Some 'water worlds' like Jupiter's moon Europa could potentially be habitable for life. NASA/JPL-Caltech/SETI Institute The search ...

Circumbinary planets experience a time varying irradiation pattern as they orbit their two host stars. In this work, we present the first detailed study of the atmospheric effects of this irradiation ...

Planets smaller than Neptune but larger than Earth, with atmospheres saturated with water vapor due to extreme temperatures, are puzzling astronomers. Scientists have developed an improved model to ...

An international team of astronomers has discovered a distant planetary system that challenges long-standing theories of how planets form. Across our galaxy, astronomers routinely observe a ...

Planetary systems such as our solar system take hundreds of millions of years to evolve. Since humanity has only existed for a sliver of that time, astronomers have only observed planetary systems at ...

The search for life beyond Earth is a key driver of modern astronomy and planetary science. The U.S. is building multiple major telescopes and planetary probes to advance this search. However, the ...