Illustration comparing the planets of the Solar System and the Sun on the same scale. The planets are shown to scale relative to each other but their distances are not. From left to right the bodies ...

Roughly four and a half billion years ago the planet Theia slammed into Earth, destroying itself, melting large portions of our planet’s mantle and ejecting a huge debris disk that later pulled ...

Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. Artist’s impression of the planet Theia colliding with ancient Earth to create the moon. (MPS/Mark A. Garlick) Roughly four and a ...

A long-lost planet that helped create the Moon may have formed much closer to the Sun than scientists once thought, according to new research. Scientists have discovered that Theia, the ancient planet ...

Simulations reveal that Jupiter’s rapid growth disrupted the early solar system, creating rings where new planetesimals formed much later than expected. These late-forming bodies match the ages and ...

Earth may have a moon today because a nearby neighbor once crashed into us, a new analysis of Apollo samples and terrestrial rocks reveals. When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an ...

Astronomers have spotted an intriguing cluster of objects in the Kuiper belt, the enormous, donut-shaped region of icy objects beyond the orbit of Neptune. This latest “inner kernel” was identified by ...

If you've ever wondered why we are here, then you can thank Jupiter for part of the answer. A new study from Rice University suggests that if it weren't for the gas giant, the Earth would have ...

At the far edge of the Solar System, where the Sun’s influence thins into the dark between the stars, a pair of aging spacecraft has stumbled into something unexpectedly fierce. Instead of a gentle ...

NASA just dropped a trove of new images of interstellar Comet 3I/ATLAS, as seen by some of the space agency’s spacecraft. The release comes after NASA scientists and engineers waited through the ...

The Kuiper belt, a disc of icy rocks on the outermost edges of the solar system, seems to have more structure than we thought. In 2011, researchers found a cluster of objects there on similar orbits ...