The life cycles of stars are fascinating, and sometimes the line between stars and planets isn’t as clear as it seems. Astronomers have found that under certain conditions, stars can fade, shrink, or ...

A 15-Jupiter-mass object circling a star about 133 light-years away has given astronomers their clearest chemical evidence yet that massive worlds and the smallest stars are built in fundamentally ...

Astronomers used the James Webb Space Telescope to probe the object, gathering clues on whether it grew larger over time like a planet or fragmented into smaller bits like a star. Stars are born from ...

Around stars like our Sun, the most common planets aren't giant Jupiters but smaller cousins: sub‑Neptunes, which resemble ...

Astronomers have discovered something surprising about planets beyond our solar system. Even though planets are incredibly ...

The Sun makes Earth habitable, governs its climate and drives a variety of natural phenomena through its variable magnetism. Indeed, all planets in and outside the Solar System exist under the ...

Most of the exoplanets we’ve discovered have been in relatively tight orbits around their host stars, allowing us to track them as they repeatedly loop around them. But we’ve also discovered a handful ...