Southwest Research Institute scientists propose a new model for the formation of compact exoplanetary systems that contain multiple rocky planets in tight orbits around their star. In this model, ...

Astronomers have uncovered a distant planetary system that flips a long-standing rule of planet formation on its head. Around the small red dwarf star LHS 1903, scientists expected to find rocky ...

General relativity helps explain the lack of planets around tight binary stars by driving orbital resonances that eject or destroy close-in worlds. This process naturally creates a “desert” of ...

Deep in the older, denser reaches of the Milky Way, there is a red dwarf star that shouldn’t exist — or at least, its family ...

The shape of a planet's orbit is one of its fundamental properties, along with its size and distance from its host star. Earth has a nearly circular orbit, but some planets outside our solar system, ...

AUSTIN, Texas — University of Texas at Austin astronomers William Cochran and Michael Endl, working with graduate students Robert Wittenmyer and Jacob Bean, have used the 9.2-meter Hobby-Eberly ...

This illustration shows an exoplanet orbiting around two brown dwarfs –– objects bigger than gas-giant planets but too small to be proper stars. ESO/M. Kornmesser Astronomers have discovered a ...