Over the past decade or so, astronomers have speculated about the characteristics of rogue planets in the Milky Way galaxy. These "free-floating" worlds don't orbit stars, but instead roam the ...

Building on eight years of extraordinary discoveries by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS and SDSS-II), a new program of four coordinated surveys will revolutionize the study of the distant universe, ...

Water isn't just delivered to planets by comets and asteroids — it can also be forged as worlds form, a new study finds.

It's easy to imagine clone armies, lightsabers, and starships on some of these very real planets.

UNDATED (WKRC) - Stargazers have a few upcoming opportunities to see our home galaxy spread across the night sky. Earth is one of hundreds of billions planets in the Milky Way, and the galaxy expands ...

The Milky Way keeps its planets close to its chest. Stars in a thin, flat disk bisecting the galaxy have more planets on average than stars in a thicker, enveloping disk — and astronomers now think ...

Learn how many suns exist in the Milky Way and how to understand how many sun-like stars are out there could help us ...

How many planets do you think are in this photo? At least hundreds of thousands according to a new joint Japan-New Zealand survey that scanned the center of the Milky Way in 2006-2007 looking for ...

IMAGE: An artist’s impression of a free-floating planet. Using observations and archival data from several of NSF’s NOIRLab’s observatories, together with observations from telescopes around the world ...

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) - It turns out that looming collision between our Milky Way and Andromeda galaxies might not happen after all. Astronomers reported Monday that the probability of the two ...

(AP) Our Milky Way is home to at least 17 billion planets that are similar in size to Earth, a new estimate suggests. That’s more than two Earth-size planets for every person on the globe. Just how ...