So, even though Mercury is closer to the Sun, Venus is the hottest planet in the solar system. Mars has a hard, rocky surface with lots of iron in the soil which rusts, making the surface and ...

These conjunctions aren't rare, but they get rarer with each planet added to the chain. For example, the three innermost planets — Mercury, Venus and Earth — align within 3.6 degrees in the sky every ...

Previous examinations using ground-based tools as well as the Hubble and Spitzer space telescopes indicated SIMP 0136 was ...

One hypothesis suggests that a rogue planet, with a mass between one and two times that of Earth, may have altered their trajectories in the early solar system. Related Stories ・Scientists ...

Since its discovery in 1930, until 2006, Pluto was counted as the ninth planet in the solar system. In 2006, the International Astronomical Union reclassified it as a ‘dwarf planet’, and our ...

In deep space, far beyond our solar system ... of the planet's exotic atmosphere. (Similar to a prism, spectrographs spread an object's light into a spectrum of colors, revealing what's present ...

The fifth planet from the sun ... The largest moon in the solar system, Ganymede is also the only moon known to have its own magnetic field. Volcanoes rage on Io's surface, earning it the title ...

In recent weeks, the Sun has become so rowdy that Earth has been repeatedly bombarded with the radiation and particles ...

The rocket’s chief passenger is SPHEREx, a space telescope that will take images of the entire sky in more than a hundred colors that ... over everything in the solar system, including us.