With sapphire waterfalls, lava rain and orbits around dead stars, these distant worlds push the limits of what’s possible.

When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. There are currently more than 5,800 known planets beyond the solar system. Artist Martin Vargic ...

A four-planet system reveals remarkable insights about how planets form and how they change during their lifetime.

In a blow to anyone dreaming that complex life may exist elsewhere in the universe, a new study suggests we're unlikely to ...

Huge, red "super-Jupiter" exoplanet orbits its star. Since astronomers first looked beyond the solar system three decades ago to discover extrasolar planets, or exoplanets, we've known that planets in ...

Planets are about as scarce as they can be in our summer evening sky. Earth is the only one that’s visible as darkness falls. Just look down instead of up. All of the major planets that are visible to ...

A star about 600 light-years away is giving astronomers a front-row view to the environments in which rocky planets like Earth form around the most abundant stars in the universe. Called ISO-ChaI 147, ...

The International Astronomical Union (IAU) defines a planet as a celestial body orbiting the Sun, possessing sufficient mass for a nearly spherical shape, and having cleared its orbital neighborhood ...

A new research paper, published in the Science Advances journal, has postulated that rocky planets like ours may be far more common than we previously believed. Previously, scientists had concurred ...

The coldest and densest molecular gas clouds in the interstellar medium can have temperatures of 10 K (-505 °F/-263 °C), ...