A tiny meteorite is rewriting what scientists thought they knew about the origins of our solar system. New evidence found in shavings from a meteorite known as Northwest Africa 12264 — a 50-gram (1.8 ...

Astronomers have discovered that the Solar System traversed the Orion star-forming complex, a component of the Radcliffe Wave galactic structure, approximately 14 million years ago. This journey ...

There’s a bit of a paradox about our galaxy: it’s both jam-packed with stars and cavernously empty. The Milky Way is crowded in the sense that it holds hundreds of billions of stars, as well as ...

A newly discovered object speeding through our solar system is sparking excitement among astronomers because it’s not from around here. Believed to be a comet, the object is only the third celestial ...

Rather than slowly condensing over millions of years, the first building blocks of Earth and other planets may have formed ...

The workings of our solar system are roughly the same now as they have been for millions of years. Moons circle their planets, the planets circle the sun, the sun’s magnetic fields and sunspots wax ...

Astronomers have uncovered a massive new trans-Neptunian object, 2017 OF201, lurking at the edge of our solar system. With an orbit stretching 25,000 years and a size that may qualify it as a dwarf ...

Most of our knowledge about the Solar System’s formation and evolution comes from the study of extraterrestrial rock samples called chondritic meteorites. These rocks, which are fragments of asteroids ...

Voyager 1, launched in 1977, has traveled farther than any spacecraft in human history. After more than four decades of silent endurance through space, it now sails beyond the orbit of the outer ...

Planetary scientists have long debated where the material that formed Earth comes from. Despite its location in the inner solar system, they consider it likely that 6–40% of this material must have ...