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 ...

An interstellar visitor. To tackle this puzzle, Malhotra and colleagues considered a less-examined scenario: that a visiting star-size object tweaked these planets' paths around 4 billion years ago.

NASA artist’s conception of a brown dwarf (main) and stock image of the planets in the solar system (inset). An object between 2 and 50 times the mass of Jupiter may have flown through our ...

The planets in order from the Sun are Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. If you include the ...

Our Solar System is full of mysteries, but if the inner planets are a puzzle, the boundary between the Solar System and interstellar space is a secondhand puzzle with half the pieces missing.

This process, called accretion, is how everything in the solar system – planets, moons, comets and asteroids – came into being. The ice line. Advertisement. Article continues below this ad.

All seven of the other planets in our solar system are about to become visible at once in a great planetary alignment – here’s how to spot the celestial show. Close. Advertisement.

An interstellar visitor. To tackle this puzzle, Malhotra and colleagues considered a less-examined scenario: that a visiting ...

This link, called "trapping efficiency," shows how often scattered planets end up in stable wide orbits. The research found that in solar system-like conditions, trapping happens about 5–10% of ...

This process, called accretion, is how everything in the solar system – planets, moons, comets and asteroids – came into being. Telescopes can see young solar systems being born.

An interstellar visitor. To tackle this puzzle, Malhotra and colleagues considered a less-examined scenario: that a visiting star-size object tweaked these planets' paths around 4 billion years ago.