Scientists have used data from NASA's retired planet-hunting space telescope 'Kepler' to discover that small and large worlds have very different upbringings. The team found that larger planets on non ...

Large and small planets are born from very different circumstances, according to data from NASA's now-retired space telescope Kepler. It found that larger planets with non-circular orbits are more ...

Studying the orbits of thousands of exoplanets shows that large planets tend to have elliptical orbits, while smaller planets tend to have more circular orbits. This split coincides with several other ...

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 ...

It’s often said—we said it again ourselves just last week, in fact—that our own Solar System isn’t as typical as scientists once imagined. We’ve got four small, close-in, rocky planets (Mercury ...

Five years ago, astronomers revealed a spectacular collection of other worlds: the TRAPPIST-1 system. Newspapers around the world printed the discovery on their front pages: Astronomers had found that ...

"There really is something very different about how these giant planets form versus how small planets like Earth form." Scientists have used data from NASA's retired planet-hunting space telescope ...