Planetary systems with both super-Earths and Jupiter-type planets may be common, according to a new study. As in our own solar system, the giant planets would act as “bodyguards” protecting the smaller planets from asteroid impacts.

The discovery of the most metal-poor globular cluster recorded to date has forced scientists to rethink how both galaxies and globular clusters form.

A new study shows how methane snow accumulates on Pluto’s mountain peaks. These snowcaps – first seen by New Horizons in 2015 – look a lot like ones on Earth, but form in a very alien environment.

Are there worlds out there – orbiting distant stars – even better suited for life than Earth? Might they be older, larger, warmer, wetter and with longer-living stars? Now astronomers have identified 24 possible superhabitable worlds.

Astronomers have spotted a rare blast of light from a star being ripped apart by a supermassive black hole. The phenomenon – known as a tidal disruption event – is the closest such flare recorded to date at just over 215 million light-years from Earth.

The discovery of near-perfectly preserved billion-year-old Martian dunes is helping scientists to unravel the geologic and climatic history of the red planet.

For the first time, astronomers have obtained an image of the very young gas giant exoplanet Beta Pictoris c, 63 light-years away. Its sibling, Beta Pictoris b, was discovered and photographed in 2008.

A large asteroid will pass Earth at more than 11 times the moon’s distance on November 29, 2020, and will approach more closely in later flybys. Charts here for telescope users.

All these years, NASA scientists have laboriously sifted through spacecraft images to identify and classify markings on Mars. Now they’re using a new “classifier,” powered by artificial intelligence. What takes a human 40 minutes takes the AI tool an average of just 5 seconds.

In a fun cosmic coincidence, researchers used old Kepler spacecraft data to discover an Earth-sized exoplanet with an orbital period of 3.14 days, a number that matches the mathematical constant pi.