Small, rocky planets can coalesce around a wide variety of stars, suggesting that Earth-like alien worlds may have formed early and often throughout our Milky Way galaxy's history, a new study reveals ...

The Milky Way as a laboratory for civilizations Any attempt to chart alien societies has to start with the structure of The Milky Way itself, a disk roughly 100,000 light years across with hundreds of ...

Just three decades ago, astronomers had no evidence that planets commonly orbited other stars. Then in 2025, NASA confirmed ...

An unusual collection of stars may represent the remnants of a dwarf galaxy that the Milky Way devoured about 10 billion years ago. Astronomers have dubbed the ancient galaxy Loki, after the Norse god ...

New simulations of Milky Way-like galaxies reveal that the strange split between two chemically distinct groups of stars may arise from several very different evolutionary events. Bursts of star ...

Sign up for CNN’s Wonder Theory science newsletter. Explore the universe with news on fascinating discoveries, scientific advancements and more. A collision between ...

Harvard astrophysicist Avi Loeb has floated the provocative idea that humans might themselves be alien‑made 'autonomous probes,' built through advanced synthetic biology rather than evolving entirely ...

Though the Milky Way is generally always visible from Earth, certain times of year are better for stargazers to catch a glimpse of the band of billions of stars. "Milky Way season," when the galaxy's ...