Science fiction promises faster-than-light travel and easy journeys to other stars, but physics may have built a prison ...

While life on Mars (and Venus) has long been an obsession for those wondering if we're alone, there are other places in our ...

Astronomers have discovered the earliest seeds of rocky planets forming in the gas around a baby sun-like star, providing a precious peek into the dawn of our own solar system. It’s an unprecedented ...

A rare meteorite has revealed evidence of a massive lost world that once orbited the young Sun before being destroyed in a catastrophic collision. The discovery suggests some early planets formed from ...

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The solar system is embedded within the expanding solar atmosphere, i.e., the solar wind, a tenuous plasma, consisting mostly of protons and electrons, continuously emitted by the Sun. Each body that ...

On a clear night, it dominates the sky, bright enough to cast shadows and large enough for dark patches and surface features ...

PARIS, France — An interstellar comet that blazed past the Sun last year could be nearly three times older than our Solar ...

The catalog of known worlds beyond our solar system has crossed another threshold. NASA’s official tally now exceeds 6,000 ...

We advocate for a mission concept study for a space telescope dedicated to solar system science in Earth orbit. Such a study was recommended by the Committee on Astrobiology and Planetary Science ...

Estimating ages of specific events is one of the most difficult problems in astrophysics. While we have a precise (and probably accurate) age for the solar system, we do not have precise ages for each ...

Approximately 4.5 billion years ago, a cold cloud of gas and dust buried deep in one of the Milky Way galaxy’s spiral arms started to collapse. From there, gravity worked its magic. The cloud began to ...