planetary

Have you ever heard of Planetary Co-Presence? A lot of people are like “Oh it’s the conjunctions, sextiles, squares that matter” but a co-presence is equally as important as the rest. Most people don’t know this, but in ancient…

Planetary nebulae are short-lived “leftovers” of sun-like stars. Most of these “star ghosts” only last—at most—about 25,000 years. Usually, their clouds of debris disperse so broadly that they fade out fairly quickly. However, there’s…

What do UX Tauri, RW Aurigae, AS 205, Z CMajoris, and FU Orionis have in common? They’re young stellar systems with disks where planets could form. It appears those disks were disturbed by stellar flybys or other close encounters in the…

This illustration shows a white dwarf star siphoning off debris from shattered objects in a planetary system. The Hubble Space Telescope detects the spectral signature of the vaporized debris that revealed a combination of rocky-metallic…

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Is our Solar System comparable to other solar systems? What do other systems look like? We know from exoplanet studies that many other systems have hot Jupiters, massive gas giants that orbit extremely close to their stars. Is that…

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Not all planetary systems are alike. Out there in the big, wide galaxy, a number of different configurations have been spotted, some vastly different from our home system. These include extrasolar planets, or exoplanets, that orbit not…

A new study by a group of astrophysicists suggests that planets can become intelligent if they reach certain thresholds. (Image credit: Shutterstock)A group of astrophysicists has proposed that individual planets are capable of…

We tend to think of intelligence as something that describes just one individual. But it's possible to describe all kinds of collectives as intelligent, too – whether we're talking about social groups of humans, enclaves of insects, or…