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 ...

New modeling of the early solar system is reshaping the familiar story of how the Moon formed, suggesting that Earth and the impactor known as Theia may have spent their youth circling the Sun as near ...

The steady discovery of giant planets orbiting stars other than our sun has heightened speculation that there could be Earth-type worlds in nearby planetary systems capable of sustaining life. Now ...

Astronomers studying a faint red dwarf star called LHS 1903 have found a four-planet system arranged in a sequence that no standard model of planet formation predicted. The system follows a ...

Snapshots from six computer simulations illustrating the distinct tectonic regimes of terrestrial planets, including the newly discovered “episodic-squishy lid” regime. This framework provides a new ...