Planets | featured news

Images taken by NASA early Monday show a scar in the atmosphere near the south pole of the gas giant.

A major component of Europe's ExoMars rover mission is being dropped to contain costs.

Astronomers calculate there is a tiny chance that Mars or Venus might collide with Earth - though not for at least a billion years.

A distant "sun" residing in the constellation Aquila has become the smallest star known to host a planet.

Venetia Phair, who was 11 years old when she suggested Pluto as the name of the newly discovered planet, has died in England. She was 90.

Rocks from Mars could be brought to the UK within the next 20 years, if a bid to host a study facility is successful.

The largest volcano on Mars may hold water and the possibility of life.

This month you'll have an opportunity to see all five naked-eye planets – but not all at once. Two of them are evening objects, while the other three are clustered together low in the east-southeast sky deep in the dawn twilight.

As astronomers become more adept at hunting for, and finding, exoplanets orbiting stars beyond the Solar System, international astronomers have figured out just what we should be looking for, using the increasingly sophisticated technologies being developed.

In a feat that until recently was thought impossible, a team of scientists have captured the first ever visible-light image of a planet orbiting another star.