The Protoplanetary Disk and Planet Formation Approximately 4.6 billion years ago ... This allowed for the formation of the gas giants—Jupiter and Saturn—and the ice giants—Uranus and ...

In the cold, dark outskirts of planetary systems far beyond the reach of the known planets, mysterious gas giants and ...

The discovery could challenge our theories of how gas giants like Jupiter form. Astronomers have discovered an unusual planetary system consisting of a Jupiter-sized planet orbiting a tiny star ...

A recent study found that Jupiter was once twice the size that it is now, making it big enough to swallow up 2,000 Earths.

The study by Konstantin Batygin of Caltech and Fred Adams of the University of Michigan pulls off a rare feat in planetary ...

Neptune, the farthest planet from the Sun, is a gas giant that orbits the Sun at an average distance of about 2.8 billion miles (4.5 billion km). Its thick atmosphere is composed mainly of ...

A cloud of collapsing gas created our Sun, the first thing to form in our solar system. This happened about 4½ billion years ...

Jupiter wasn’t always the planet we know today—it was once twice as big, had a magnetic field 50 times stronger, and its ...

In this theory, gas giant planets like Jupiter and Saturn form by gradually piecing together a solid core out of debris orbiting a young star (SN: 4/14/22). That core eventually gets massive ...

Rather than a distant gas giant like Jupiter ... whipping around it once every 4.2 days. At such proximity the planet would broil at around 1,800 degrees Fahrenheit, hot enough to vaporize ...