Planet news, features and articles

The odd atmosphere of a fledgling exoplanet is causing astronomers to question leading theories of how planets form.

Computer modeling suggests Saturn's rings are billions of years older than previous research suggests — but the new findings are up for debate.

"She still has one final gift for us, which is that she's now going to continue on as a weather station of sorts."

Researchers have detected a giant tail of gas leaking from an exoplanet near Earth. The giant structure, which is up to 350,000 miles long, is being blown away from the alien world by stellar gusts, allowing researchers to use it like a windsock.

China's planned mission to bring rock samples to Earth from Mars would beat both NASA and the European Space Agency to the punch.

A pair of massive thunderstorms have been spotted swirling in Jupiter's "South Equatorial Belt" and are likely unleashing massive bolts of green lightning. Some experts think the pale clouds could end up altering the rusty band's color — and potentially even making it "disappear."

"We would have loved to find that Venus was once a planet much closer to our own, so it’s kind of sad in a way to find out that it wasn't."

Was alien life in "hot water" on Mars billions of years ago? New evidence from the Martian meteorite "Black Beauty" suggests so.

Curiosity has just finished the latest leg of its 12-year Mars mission and will now set out to explore miles of web-like surface features left behind by ancient water on the Red Planet. The zig-zagging rocks could also provide clues about whether Mars once harbored extraterrestrial life.

A new study has identified an exoplanet that is just 3 million years old — around 1,500 times younger than Earth — alongside a misaligned protoplanetary disk that researchers cannot explain.