The Early Solar System Had a Mysterious Gap Where the Asteroid Belt Is Today
Wind the cosmic clock back a few billion years and our Solar System looked much different than it does today. About 4.5 billion years ago,…
Solar System
Planetary Composition: The Planet Does Not Fall Far From the Star
A compositional link between planets and their respective host star has long been assumed in astronomy. For the first time now, a team of scientists,…
A Mysterious Gap Within the Solar System’s Protoplanetary Disk
Scientists find evidence the early solar system harbored a gap between its inner and outer regions. The cosmic boundary, perhaps caused by a young Jupiter…
Planet Discovered That Survived Its Star’s Death: A Crystal Ball Into Our Solar System’s Future
Giant gas planet orbiting a dead star gives glimpse into the predicted aftermath of our sun’s demise. Astronomers have discovered the very first confirmed planetary…
NASA’s Psyche Spacecraft To Explore Unique Asteroid for Clues to Early Solar System
Set to launch next year, NASA’s Psyche mission marks the first time the agency has set out to explore an asteroid richer in metal than…
How Special Are We? New Clues to the Formation of Our Solar System
Nearby star-forming region yields clues to the formation of our solar system. The radioactive elements could have been blown onto the nascent solar system by…
Planet 9 May Be Out There – Here’s Where We Need To Look
There are eight known planets in the solar system (ever since Pluto was booted from the club), but for a while, there has been some…
The Solar Wind Across Our Solar System [Infographic]
The Sun releases a constant stream of particles and magnetic fields called the solar wind. This solar wind slams worlds across the solar system with…
Sculpted by Starlight: An Unusual Meteorite Witness to the Solar System’s Birth
Researchers use unusual meteorite to gain insight into our solar system’s past, present. In 2011, scientists confirmed a suspicion: There was a split in the…
“Big Surprise!” – Heavy Metal Vapors Unexpectedly Found in Comets Throughout Our Solar System – and Beyond
A new study by a Belgian team using data from the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (ESO’s VLT) has shown that iron and nickel…
Putting the Pieces Back Together: Scientists Reconstruct Solar System’s Original Architecture
As the solar system was developing, the giant planets (Jupiter and Saturn) formed very early, and as they grew, they migrated both closer to and…
Extinct Atom and a Clever Trick Reveals the Long-Kept Secrets of the Solar System
Using the extinct niobium-92 atom, ETH researchers have been able to date events in the early solar system with greater precision than before. The study…
“Farfarout” – Astronomers Confirm Solar System’s Most Distant Planetoid
A team, including an astronomer from the University of Hawaiʻi Institute for Astronomy (IfA), have confirmed a planetoid that is almost four times farther from…
Solar System Formation in Two Steps – Explains Composition and Features of Planets, Asteroids and Meteorites
An international team of researchers from the University of Oxford, LMU Munich, ETH Zurich, BGI Bayreuth, and the University of Zurich discovered that a two-step…
Global Solar Wind Structure Instrument for the Interstellar Mapping and Acceleration Probe Will Help Chart Earth’s Astronomical Neighborhood
NASA and the Ministry of Science and Higher Education of the Republic of Poland have agreed to cooperate on a NASA heliophysics mission, the Interstellar…
Solving a Paradox to Uncover Key Clues About Our Solar System’s History
New clues lead to a better understanding of the evolution of the solar system and the origin of Earth as a habitable planet. In a…
Meteorites Reveal Chaotic Early Solar System Collisions Resembled “Asteroids” Arcade Game
One Friday evening in 1992, a meteorite ended a more than 150 million-mile journey by smashing into the trunk of a red Chevrolet Malibu in…
Meteorites Show That Our Solar System Formed in Less Than 200,000 Years
A long time ago — roughly 4.5 billion years — our sun and solar system formed over the short time span of 200,000 years. That…