A small, inconspicuous meteorite may be about to change our understanding of how and when our solar system formed. Tiny shavings from the meteorite Northwest Africa 12264 are challenging the long-held ...

The outer solar system. Beyond the asteroid belt are the gas and ice giants: Jupiter; ... Raymond, Sean N., et al. "Building the terrestrial planets: Constrained accretion in the inner Solar System.

Rocky bodies called protoplanets were thought to have formed slightly earlier in the inner solar system than those beyond the ...

How did Earth, alone among the Solar System's rocky planets, become the home for life? How, among all this frigid ...

Close stellar encounters could change the structure of our planetary system, potentially dooming Earth or other worlds to ...

Mercury is by far the smallest planet in the solar system, with only around 5.5% of both the mass and volume of Earth.Despite that diminutiveness, Mercury manages to be the second-densest planet ...

When the Sun expands into a red giant, it will swallow the inner solar system and raise the temperature in the outer regions. Skip to content Introducing the all-new Astronomy.com Forum!

In the remote outer reaches of planetary systems, far beyond the orbit of known planets, enormous and mysterious worlds silently loop around their stars. Some drift as far as 10,000 times the distance ...

Stars passing close to the sun could cause planets to collide, including with Earth, or even be ejected as rogue planets, new ...