When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. Artwork depicting how water, both regular and heavy, comes from giant molecular clouds and is ...

Protoplanetary disks are the birthplaces of planets, but few discoveries have stretched scientific expectations like IRAS ...

For the first time, NASA's James Webb Space Telescope has seen a young star forge crystals in blazing heat and hurl them to ...

A strange, sandwich-shaped object is giving astronomers a rare view of the chaotic birthplaces of planets.

New research suggests that essential components of life may assemble in interstellar space long before planets or oceans ...

Many of the most interesting bodies in our Solar System aren’t planets, but the moons that orbit them. They have active volcanoes, hydrocarbon oceans, geysers, and moon-wide oceans buried under icy ...

NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope captures visible and infrared images of protoplanetary disks, showing gas and dust structures ...

In the swirling clouds of gas and dust that surround newborn stars, planets begin to form. These planet-forming disks are rich with clues about how worlds like Earth come to be. Until now, scientists ...

Stars and planets are inextricably linked. They form together and stars shape the fate of planets. Stars create the dusty protoplanetary disks that give birth to planets of all kinds. And when a star ...

Astronomers using ALMA have discovered that planet-forming discs are not flat and serene but subtly warped, reshaping our understanding of how planets form. These slight tilts, similar to those seen ...

Astronomers have, for the first time, captured a detailed snapshot of planetary systems in an era long shrouded in mystery.