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For first time, the mass and distance of a solitary “rogue” planet has been measured

The galaxy is expected to be home to billions of free-floating, or "rogue", planets that have no stellar companion. These worlds have been kicked out of the system where they formed, and they travel ...

Distant planets once linked to oceans may be full of magma

Astronomers have spent the past decade cataloguing thousands of planets beyond the solar system, many of them falling into a ...
Wired

First to-scale Solar System model built in seven miles of desert

The universe, as Douglas Adams so memorably explained, is big. Really big. But so are the things inside it -- even objects like the Solar System, which on a galactic scale are absolutely minuscule. A ...
Houston Chronicle

New model helps to figure out which distant planets may host life

(THE CONVERSATION) The search for life beyond Earth is a key driver of modern astronomy and planetary science. The U.S. is building multiple major telescopes and planetary probes to advance this ...