In the cold, dark outskirts of planetary systems far beyond the reach of the known planets, mysterious gas giants and planetary masses silently orbit their stars—sometimes thousands of astronomical units (AU) away. For years, ...
A small team led by Sihao Cheng, Martin A. and Helen Chooljian Member in the Institute for Advanced Study's School of Natural Sciences, has discovered an extraordinary trans-Neptunian object (TNO), named 2017 OF201, at the ...
The solar system consists of our star, the sun, and everything bound to it by gravity: the planets Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune, along with dwarf planets like Pluto, dozens of moons, and ...
University of Central Florida (UCF) scientists and their collaborators discovered new insights into the formation of distant icy objects in space beyond Neptune, offering a deeper understanding of our solar system's formation ...
Exploration of the outer solar system may be getting a boost from the Vera Rubin Observatory (VRO). When this gigantic telescope opens its eye later in 2025, it begins a decade-long survey of the ever-changing sky. As part ...
The puzzle of predicting how three gravitationally bound bodies move in space has challenged mathematicians for centuries, and has most recently been popularized in the novel and television show "3 Body Problem." There's ...
The organic material found in a few areas on the surface of dwarf planet Ceres is probably of exogenic origin. Impacting asteroids from the outer asteroid belt may have brought it with them.
New studies led by researchers at the University of Central Florida offer for the first time a clearer picture of how the outer solar system formed and evolved based on analyses of trans-Neptunian objects (TNOs) and centaurs.
Although our solar system is billions of years old, we've only recently become better acquainted with one of its more dynamic and captivating inhabitants known as (2060) Chiron.
Trying to understand the makeup and evolution of the solar system's Kuiper belt has kept researchers busy since it was hypothesized soon after the discovery of Pluto in 1930. In particular, binary pairs of objects there are ...
