
Old planets always get too hot or cold for life in the end
27 July 2016
Searching for alien life on planets orbiting older stars may be fruitless - they nearly always lose their liquid water with time

27 July 2016
Searching for alien life on planets orbiting older stars may be fruitless - they nearly always lose their liquid water with time

26 July 2016
Ceres has surprisingly few large craters for a dwarf planet located in an asteroid belt, but its muddy composition could have wiped away the biggest impacts

14 July 2016
New Horizons buzzed by Pluto and its moons last July, giving us a front-row seat to see icy peaks, towering atmospheric haze, a kilometres-deep canyon and more

22 June 2016
If Pluto’s inner sea froze recently, we should see ridges popping up in the dwarf planet's outer shell. Since we don’t, it's probably still liquid

8 June 2016
The weird orbits of some bodies in the outer solar system reveal they are booty from an interstellar smash and grab raid, says astronomer Simon Portegies Zwart

1 June 2016
Our sun will swell, our galaxy will collide with its neighbour and the universe could suddenly be swallowed by a vacuum bubble

16 May 2016
Observations of a supposed comet that skirts close to the sun reveal it doesn't really act like one – so may be a different kind of space rock altogether

12 May 2016
A body known only as 2007 OR10 has been given a boost by recent space telescope observations that peg it smaller than only Pluto and Eris

4 May 2016
Three recently discovered nearby exoplanets may not be as habitable as they first looked, as their hot young star could have left them high and dry

2 May 2016
Astronomers have discovered three exoplanets in orbit around a nearby dwarf star, making them good targets for atmospheric analysis