Key science: Stellar dynamics, N-body simulations, planetary orbital stability, and galactic gravitational potentials.

Finding life beyond our solar system is a major goal of modern astronomy. NASA's planned Habitable Worlds Observatory (HWO) ...

Finding life beyond our solar system is a major goal of modern astronomy. NASA's planned Habitable Worlds Observatory (HWO) aims to take direct ...

Astronomers have found some pretty wild exoplanets. Some are balls of lava the temperature of hell, one is partially made of diamond, and another may rain molten iron. However, not all exoplanets are ...

The weather on the gas giant Ditsö̀ is literally alien. Clouds of solid quartz appear and disappear thanks to silicon and oxygen atoms continually evaporating from and then condensing in its ...

The thinking around exoplanet habitability is mostly concerned with a planet's distance from its star. Too close, and any surface water is boiled away into space. Too far, and surface water is frozen.

Astronomers used a 3D global computer model to compare the climates of exoplanets in different stellar and orbital configurations. They found that a planet orbiting a white dwarf star would offer a ...

Left: Artistic conception of the longheld astronomical assumption of brown dwarfs resembling Jupiter in appearance, displaying prominent multiple zonal bands and stable vortices similar to the Great ...

SANTA CRUZ — Xi Zhang, a professor of Earth and planetary science at UC Santa Cruz, has discovered that an exoplanet classed as a “super-Jupiter” has substantial differences from our solar system’s ...