Planets are usually defined by the star they orbit. Take away the star, and a planet becomes almost impossible to find. This is because almost every method astronomers use to detect planets depends on ...

As J.R.R. Tolkien wrote in The Fellowship of the Ring, “Not all those who wander are lost.” But in the case of planets, it’s possible that most of them are. Rogue planets—planets that are adrift in ...

In 1995, a pair of scientists discovered a planet outside our solar system orbiting a solar-type star. Since that finding—which won the scientists a portion of the 2019 Nobel Prize in ...