New spacecraft techniques propose using CubeSats, laser rangefinding, and precise Doppler measurements to determine the mass ...

The cast of exoplanets has an extraordinary new member. Using ESO’s telescopes, astronomers have discovered an approximately seven- Jupiter-mass companion to an object that is itself only twice as ...

When a star is young, it is often still surrounded by a primordial rotating disk of gas and dust, from which planets can form. Astronomers like to find such disks because they might be able to catch ...

Planetary-mass objects (PMOs) are cosmic nomads: they drift freely through space, unbound to any star, and weigh less than 13 times the mass of Jupiter. While they have been spotted in abundance in ...

Scientists have identified a lone planet with a ferocious appetite. Located in the Chamaeleon constellation roughly 620 light-years away, the rogue planet, named Cha 1107-7626, exists in the vast ...

A young rogue planet about 620 light-years away from Earth has experienced a record-breaking "growth spurt," hoovering up some six billion tons of gas and dust each second over a couple of months. A ...

This one-million-year-old star-forming region contains thousands of new stars and hundreds of planetary mass objects floating freely in the nebula, not orbiting stars. A groundbreaking study published ...

How do rogue planetary-mass objects -- celestial bodies with masses between stars and planets -- form? An international team of astronomers has used advanced simulations to show that these enigmatic ...