Astronomers have, for the first time, pinned down both the mass and distance of a planet that drifts through the galaxy ...

A strange, starless cloud on the edge of a nearby galaxy is forcing astronomers to confront one of the biggest unknowns in ...

This one-million-year-old star-forming region contains thousands of new stars and hundreds of planetary mass objects floating freely in the nebula, not orbiting stars. A groundbreaking study published ...

How do rogue planetary-mass objects -- celestial bodies with masses between stars and planets -- form? An international team of astronomers has used advanced simulations to show that these enigmatic ...

Scientists using a global array of radio telescopes have detected the universe’s lowest-mass dark object by observing how it warped light through gravitational lensing. The invisible mass, about a ...

When a star is young, it is often still surrounded by a primordial rotating disk of gas and dust, from which planets can form. Astronomers like to find such disks because they might be able to catch ...

Dark matter is an enigmatic form of matter not expected to emit light, yet it is essential to understanding how the rich tapestry of stars and galaxies we see in the night sky evolved. As a ...

James is a published author with multiple pop-history and science books to his name. He specializes in history, space, strange science, and anything out of the ordinary.View full profile James is a ...