Astronomers using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope have imaged the largest protoplanetary disk ever observed circling a young star. For the first time in visible light, Hubble has revealed the disk is unexpectedly chaotic and ...
The giant planets weren't always where we find them today. Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune formed in a more compact configuration and later underwent a violent reshuffling that scattered them to their current positions. ...
Observations with the instrument SPHERE at ESO's Very Large Telescope have produced an unprecedented gallery of "debris disks" in exoplanetary systems.
A vast region of our solar system, called the Kuiper belt, stretches from the orbit of Neptune out to 50 or so astronomical units (AU), where an AU is the distance between Earth and the sun. This region consists mostly of ...
In 1949, famed mathematician and physicist John von Neumann delivered a series of addresses at the University of Illinois, where he introduced the concept of the "universal constructor." The theory was further detailed in ...
An international team of astronomers have employed the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) to observe a nearby M-dwarf star known as TWA 20. As a result, they detected a large debris disk around this star. The finding was reported ...
University of Warwick astronomers have uncovered the chemical fingerprint of a frozen, water-rich planetary fragment being consumed by a white dwarf star outside our solar system.
In our nearby stellar neighborhood, a burned-out star is snacking on a fragment of a Pluto-like object. With its unique ultraviolet capability, only NASA's Hubble Space Telescope could identify that this meal is taking place.
Astronomers have discovered what they think may be another moon orbiting a distant dwarf planet called Quaoar. This small, icy, egg-shaped planet in the far reaches of our solar system, beyond Neptune, is already known to ...
Asteroid Bennu—the target of NASA's OSIRIS-REx sample return mission, led by the University of Arizona—is a mixture of materials from throughout, and even beyond, our solar system. Over the past few billion years, its unique ...
