A 24-year-old observatory assistant from the Midwest discovered Pluto. Clyde Tombaugh, born in 1906 in Streator, Illinois, ...

Learn how Pluto nearly kept its planet status in a proposed 12-planet Solar System as its demotion marks its 20th anniversary ...

Jupiter is the largest planet in the Solar System, a massive gas giant so enormous that its gravitational influence reaches ...

We live in uninteresting times. Since the ructions that created the planets in the solar system’s first 100 million years (see “How was the solar system built?”) – and apart from an early migration of ...

Nasa's powerful James Webb Space Telescope is showing us something humankind has never witnessed firsthand before: The birth ...

Since the first discovery of a planet orbiting another star in 1992, some 280 alien solar systems have been identified. Most look quite unlike ours, and for good reason. Planets are mainly spied by ...

Our solar system is a smashing success. A new study suggests that from its earliest period — even before the last of its nebular gas had been consumed — Earth’s solar system and its planets looked ...

Spiral Galaxy from Kirkland et al. CREDIT Chris Kirkland and colleagues. A new study of zircon crystals from two of Earth’s oldest continents indicates that the formation of Earth’s continental crust ...

Ever since Isaac Newton famously talked about gravity, its dominance as a force in our solar system has been well known. It's responsible for the orbits of the planets and their satellites, but there ...

And the earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep. Sometimes, if the night is dark and clear enough, you can look up and see the Milky Way in its arc across the sky.

Estimating ages of specific events is one of the most difficult problems in astrophysics. While we have a precise (and probably accurate) age for the solar system, we do not have precise ages for each ...