Related topics: solar system · comet

Dwarf star 200 light-years away contains life's building blocks

Many scientists believe the Earth was dry when it first formed, and that the building blocks for life on our planet—carbon, nitrogen and water—appeared only later as a result of collisions with other objects in our solar ...

The solar system's 'yearbook' is about to get filled in

Lined up like familiar faces in your high school yearbook, here are images of the 33 largest objects in the Solar System, ordered in size by mean radius. Engineer Radu Stoicescu put this great graphic together, using the ...

New Horizons collects first science on a post-Pluto object

Warming up for a possible extended mission as it speeds through deep space, NASA's New Horizons spacecraft has now twice observed 1994 JR1, a 90-mile (145-kilometer) wide Kuiper Belt object (KBO) orbiting more than 3 billion ...

What is A dwarf planet?

The term dwarf planet has been tossed around a lot in recent years. As part of a three-way categorization of bodies orbiting the sun, the term was adopted in 2006 due to the discovery of objects beyond the orbit of Neptune ...

New Horizons team unravels the many mysteries of Ultima Thule

The farthest object ever explored is slowly revealing its secrets, as scientists piece together the puzzles of Ultima Thule – the Kuiper Belt object NASA's New Horizons spacecraft flew past on New Year's Day, four billion ...

New dwarf planet found in our solar system

(Phys.org)—A team of space scientists at the University of Michigan has discovered a dwarf planet that is approximately half the size of Pluto and twice as far from the sun. The sighting was reported by NPR, which interviewed ...

Science papers reveal new aspects of Pluto and its moons

A year ago, Pluto was just a bright speck in the cameras of NASA's approaching New Horizons spacecraft, not much different than its appearances in telescopes since Clyde Tombaugh discovered the then-ninth planet in 1930.

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