A distant star system with four super-sized gas giants has revealed a surprise. Thanks to JWST’s powerful vision, astronomers detected sulfur in their atmospheres — a chemical clue that they formed ...
Gas giants are massive worlds made mostly of hydrogen and helium. They lack solid surfaces, and in our solar system, Jupiter ...
Aging stars can completely destroy their planets. When a star reaches the end of its life on the main sequence, it goes ...
Scientists have identified a rocky outer planet in a system where a gas giant was expected. The discovery challenges ...
Gas giants are enormous planets made primarily of hydrogen and helium. They may contain dense central cores, but unlike Earth, they do not have solid ...
Gas giants possibly developed slowly in the solar system. They developed cores layer by layer within a disk of ice and dust ...
Planetary systems in the Milky Way galaxy tend to follow a particular pattern: rocky planets toward the center, closest to ...
Gas giants are large planets mostly composed of helium and/or hydrogen. Although these planets have dense cores, they don't have hard surfaces. Jupiter and Saturn are the gas giants in our solar ...
A young star called V1298 Tau is giving astronomers a front-row seat to the birth of the galaxy’s most common planets. Four massive but extremely low-density worlds orbiting the star appear to be ...
If a gas giant planet is big enough to ignite deuterium fusion, it becomes a brown dwarf instead of a planet. But this definition is incomplete and does not tell us how gas giants form or what ...
Relatedly, astronomers may have just pushed the upper size limit of what counts as a planet.