Images taken by the Hubble Space Telescope document the formation of a Great Dark Spot on Neptune for the first time, report researchers in a new study. […]

The giant planet Jupiter was formed four times further from the sun than its current orbit, and migrated inwards in the solar system over a period of 700,000 years. Researchers found proof of this incredible journey thanks to a group of asteroids close to Jupiter. […]

The latest data from the giant planets has sent researchers back to the drawing board. Cassini orbited Saturn for 13 years before its dramatic final dive into the planet's interior, while Juno has been orbiting Jupiter for two and a half years; the data collected has been 'invaluable but also confounding,' said one of the researchers. […]

Juna Kollmeier and Sean Raymond kicked off an internet firestorm late last year when they posted a draft of their article about submoons on a preprint server. The online conversation obsessed over the best term to describe such phenomena. But nomenclature was not the point of Kollmeier and Raymond's investigation, who set out to define the physical parameters for moons that would be capable of being stably orbited by other, smaller moons. […]

The Juno spacecraft captured new images of a volcanic plume on Jupiter's moon Io during a December 21 flyby. JunoCam, the Stellar Reference Unit (SRU), the Jovian Infrared Auroral Mapper (JIRAM), and the Ultraviolet Imaging Spectrograph (UVS) observed Io for over an hour, providing a glimpse of the moon's polar regions as well as evidence of an active eruption. […]

Much has changed technologically since NASA's Galileo mission dropped a probe into Jupiter's atmosphere to investigate, among other things, the heat engine driving the gas giant's atmospheric circulation. […]

Over 4000 exoplanets have been discovered since the first one in 1995, but the vast majority of them orbit their stars with relatively short periods of revolution. Indeed, to confirm the presence of a planet, it is necessary to wait until it has made one or more revolutions around its star. This can take from a few days for the closest to the star to decades for the furthest away: Jupiter for example takes 11 years to go around the sun. Only a telescope dedicated to the search for exoplanets […]

A stellar flare ten times more powerful than anything seen on our sun has burst from an ultracool star almost the same size as Jupiter. […]

In the coming years, NASA has some bold plans to build on the success of the New Horizons mission. Not only did this spacecraft make history by conducting the first-ever flyby of Pluto in 2015, it has since followed up on that by making the first encounter in history with a Kuiper Belt object (KBO) – 2014 MU69 (aka Ultima Thule). […]

Astronomers have discovered a third planet in the Kepler-47 system, securing the system's title as the most interesting of the binary-star worlds. Using data from NASA's Kepler space telescope, a team of researchers, led by astronomers at San Diego State University, detected the new Neptune-to-Saturn-size planet orbiting between two previously known planets.&nbs […]