Planets

The search for alien life should broaden its horizons a bit, a new study suggests.

Venus is Earth's twisted twin in so many ways, what about on the skywatching front?

Scientists used Saturn's famous rings as a seismograph to study processes in the planet's interior. The researchers found its core is like a soup consisting of rocks, ices and metallic fluids.

Sun-exploring spacecraft Solar Orbiter has captured this video of a glowing crescent of Venus as it flew past the planet during a gravity-assist flyby on Monday (Aug 9).

From worlds that rain iron and glass to diamond worlds and planets that have escaped the grip of their parent stars, here are 10 of the most extreme alien planets.

Bright reflections that radar detected beneath the south pole of Mars may not be underground lakes as previously thought but deposits of clay instead, a new study finds.

In the wisp-thin sky of Jupiter's moon Ganymede, the largest satellite in the solar system, astronomers have for the first time detected evidence of water vapor, a new study finds.

Mysterious flares of X-rays from Jupiter's auroras suggest that the giant planet's "northern lights" may possess unexpected similarities with those of Earth, a new study finds.

Some of the most fascinating worlds in our cosmic neighborhood are not planets, but the moons that orbit around them.

Life in the clouds of Venus is impossible due to the extremely low amount of water despite last year's findings suggesting the presence of organic material.

Venus may still be geologically active today, which could mean that Earth's planetary sibling is a good place for scientists to learn about early Earth and faraway worlds.

The researchers created a computer model to predict the ways the planets would scatter, finding that slight tweaks to starting positions lead to vastly different outcomes

Revisiting how Earth looks from space could offer scientists clues for finding alien life on distant worlds.

Oceans' worth of water may remain buried in the crust of Mars, and not lost to space as previously long thought, a new study finds.

Scientists think they've spied an alien world that lost its atmosphere — then conjured itself a new one.

We keep getting reminders that the Milky Way's planetary diversity dwarfs what we see in our own solar system.

Rare chemical makeup in a meteorite that fell to Earth in 2020 hints at its unusual origins: from a pre-planetary body dating to our solar system's beginnings.

Earth's last magnetic flip 42,000 years brought environmental change and extinctions. Could that happen now?

Does the solar system really have a big, dark ninth planet drifting somewhere far beyond the orbit of Neptune? A new paper argues that Planet 9 is a statistical mirage.