Stories by Nola Taylor Tillman

Data from the James Webb Space Telescope and other observatories suggests a supervolcanic exomoon may lurk around the giant exoplanet WASP-39b

Strange patterns in the orbits of small objects in the outer solar system could be explained by gaps in our understanding of gravity rather than an as-yet-unseen new world

A gas giant planet’s youthful glow could explain major differences between its four largest satellites

A promising combination of exoplanet-finding methods pinpoints details about its first world

Surprisingly, some worlds can survive being engulfed by a sunlike star when it swells to become a red giant

Four candidate worlds found via flashes of radio emission may be the first of many revealed by a new planet-hunting technique

Pluto pioneer Alan Stern and other researchers are on the cusp of flying to space alongside their experiments

The diminutive world and others like it could help astronomers probe the mysteries of planet formation

A door-sized experiment models massive star explosions

Gravitational interactions among the moons could offer new insights on the liquid layers lurking in their depths

The disk of gas and stars resembles our own Milky Way but somehow formed when the universe was only about 10 percent of its current age

The collision helped seed Earth with its precious metals

A flare predicted for this spring could confirm the object is indeed two monstrous black holes coming together

Gravitational waves attributed to the collision of two neutron stars could have been produced by something much stranger

Some stars moving fast enough to escape the galaxy likely come from a never before seen class of intermediate-mass black holes

A new study reveals surprising new details about our galaxy’s shadowy core

A new study suggests primordial seawater may lurk hidden at the hearts of many comets

Showers of interstellar debris could speed up the assembly of worlds around young stars

Pinning down the object’s orbit could reveal it to be a crucial clue in the search for undiscovered planets—or just another frozen space rock

A tug-of-war between the forces behind a planet’s orbit and its spin can throw entire worlds off-kilter

Far beyond our sun, astronomers have discovered comets bombarding a young solar-type star—and possibly its inner planets

Scientists now have a second example of a strange stellar phenomenon speculatively linked to extraterrestrial intelligence in 2015

Scientists are seeking—and not finding—thermal evidence for geysers on the Jovian moon

Brines suffused with the life-giving gas could offer hope for past and even present microbes on the Red Planet, according to a new study