An international team has made a significant breakthrough in understanding the tectonic evolution of terrestrial planets.

The International Astronomical Union (IAU) defines a planet as a celestial body orbiting the Sun, possessing sufficient mass for a nearly spherical shape, and having cleared its orbital neighborhood ...

Southwest Research Institute has collaborated with Yale University to summarize the scientific community's notable progress in advancing the understanding of the formation and evolution of the inner ...

The formation of our solar system from a singular nebula raises an intriguing question: why did each planet develop with a ...

Best chance of finding liquid water, and even life on other planets, is to look for the absence of carbon dioxide in their atmospheres. Scientists at MIT, the University of Birmingham, and elsewhere ...

find brings the number of extrasolar planets to 100. And with this total, astronomers are beginning to see patterns in planet characteristics. “When we first started out, we found planets close in to ...

Artistic concept of the PDS 70 disk. JWST observations detected water in the inner disk, where normally terrestrial planets form. Two gas giant planets carved a wide gap in the disk made of gas and ...

Illustration of the planet 55 Cancri e, also called Janssen. The search for exoplanets—worlds that orbit stars other than our sun—may be focused on discovering another Earth, but it continues to ...