A terrestrial planet's surface is sloped and carved with topographical features like mountains, valleys and canyons due to volcanic activity, shifting tectonic plates and in Earth's case, ...

Southwest Research Institute has collaborated with Yale University to summarize the scientific community's notable progress in advancing the understanding of the formation and evolution of the inner ...

“They suggest this happened when the formation of the terrestrial planets was more or less complete, apart maybe from the giant impact that formed the moon,” says Chambers, of the Carnegie ...

Astronomers have discovered that "super-Earth" planets may exist on wider orbits than previously thought — and this implies these rocky, or "terrestrial," worlds are far more common than was ...

We can estimate the time since a terrestrial planet’s surface was last “reset” (e.g., globally altered, such as by lava flows) based on crater counting, but those times are not formation ages.

The largest terrestrial planet is Earth, and the smallest gas giant is Neptune, which is four times wider and 17 times more massive than Earth. There is nothing in between. “In other star systems ...

NASA's TESS exoplanet hunter has found the fastest-disintegrating planet ever. Losing a moons-worth of matter every million years, it is a prime target for the James Webb Space Telescope.

The nearby star Vega, featured in the 1997 movie Contact, appears to have a smooth disk devoid of giant planets for reasons we can’t explain ...