Short-lived radioisotopes such as aluminum-26 influenced early solar system heat, water retention and the formation of Earth-like rocky planets, according to meteorite analyses and models.

To reproduce the orbits and masses of the terrestrial planets (analogs) of the solar system, most studies scrutinize simulations for success as a batch. However, there is insufficient discussion in ...

In the Star Wars movies fictional planets are covered with forests, oceans, deserts, and volcanoes. But new models from a team of MIT, NASA, and Carnegie scientists begin to describe an even wider ...

For decades, scientists have studied how planets form by looking at young stars nearby, assuming that these environments could be representative of all star systems. However, as astronomers discover ...

How do terrestrial planets like Earth form and evolve to enable life to exist? This is what a recent study published in Nature hopes to address as a pair of scientists from the Southwest Research ...

Best chance of finding liquid water, and even life on other planets, is to look for the absence of carbon dioxide in their atmospheres. Scientists at MIT, the University of Birmingham, and elsewhere ...

Astronomers have directly observed a free-floating planet, comparable in mass to Earth, roaming the Milky Way. Discovered via ...