A small pile of dust grains older than the Sun brings new evidence about the rate at which stars are born in the Milky Way.
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Interstellar Visitors Could Export Terrestrial Life to Other Stars
A handful of interstellar objects and long-period comets could have scooped up microorganisms from Earth and carried them to worlds around other stars.
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Hunting for Planets Around Old, Anemic Stars
Can a star make planets with 10% of what the Sun had to work with? A synergy between two powerhouse survey telescopes is helping astronomers find that answer.
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Nearest Star System May Have a Second Planet
The exoplanet candidate, tentatively named Proxima c, would be a frozen snowball.
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The “Yellowball” Catalog and the Citizen Science That Helped Define It
The online community of the Milky Way Project citizen scientists helped scientists identify compact star-forming regions now known as yellowballs.
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Giant Planets and Brown Dwarfs Form in Different Ways
Once thought to be part of the same population, planets larger than Jupiter and “failed stars” likely grow via different mechanisms, the Gemini Planet Imager Exoplanet Survey has shown.
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New Proof That Accretion Disks Align with Their Black Holes
In the most detailed and highest-resolution black hole simulation to date, an international team of researchers showed the Bardeen-Petterson effect for the first time.
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Chemical Patterns May Predict Stars That Host Giant Planets
Stars with giant planets tend to have a few key elements in abundance. A new algorithm used these patterns to predict hundreds of stars that will likely have exoplanets if we go looking for them.
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Passing Object May Have Kicked Up Dust from a Planetary Disk
The elongated tail of the SU Aurigae protoplanetary disk was likely formed as a result of a flyby from a substellar object.
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Starlike Brown Dwarf? Not Anymore
Because of a new, surprisingly smaller mass estimate for a much-studied, nearby brown dwarf, astronomers now regard the familiar object as merely planetlike.