In approximately 5 billion years, the sun will deplete its hydrogen fuel and collapse under its own gravity, becoming a white ...

For all the talk about life across the cosmos, Earth remains the only confirmed example. That single data point makes your place in the universe feel both ordinary and strange.

By combining the power of ground-based and space-based telescopes, astronomers have discovered a new brown dwarf—a type of ...

Astronomers have learned that this white dwarf, the remnant of a medium-size star after running out of nuclear fuel, has gobbled up a rocky planet from its former system. The weird part: This white ...

Our solar system is much like a trail of microcosmic breadcrumbs: Follow the molecular bits as far back as they go, and you'll learn a thing or two about where many of our planets and other celestial ...

The methane gas may constitute a rarefied atmosphere, or it may come from erupting plumes on Makemake’s surface.

Planets do not emit visible light like stars; they shine in the sky because they reflect sunlight. Exoplanets too reflect ...

Scientists have detected methane gas glowing faintly above Makemake, an icy dwarf planet smaller and farther than Pluto in space. Until now, Pluto was the only object that far out in the solar system ...

More than 50 times further from the Sun than Earth, the tiny dwarf planet Makemake is one of the last places you'd expect to find an intact gaseous atmosphere. Not only is it incredibly cold, being ...

"The complexity of the exo-Neptunian landscape provides offers a unique window onto the processes involved in the formation ...