An international team of 45 researchers studying meteor showers has found that not all comets crumble the same way when they approach the sun. In a paper published in the journal Icarus, they ascribe the differences to the ...
Apart from the sun, its planets and their moons, our solar system has vast amounts of space rocks—fragments left over from the formation of the inner planets.
The size of the solar system is defined by the volume of space over which the sun's influence exceeds those of other nearby stars in the Milky Way galaxy. This influence derives from two fundamental forces of nature: gravity ...
The Subaru Telescope's wide and deep imaging observations are contributing information to the New Horizons spacecraft as it moves through the outer solar system. By applying a unique analysis method to images of Kuiper Belt ...
A multi-institutional team of planetary scientists has learned more about the early composition of the solar system by studying a meteorite named Northwest Africa 14250. In their study, published in the journal Science Advances, ...
Stars are gravitationally fastened to their galaxies and move in concert with their surroundings. But sometimes, something breaks the bond. If a star gets too close to a supermassive black hole, for example, the black hole ...
On July 19, 1952, Palomar Observatory was undertaking a photographic survey of the night sky. Part of the project was to take multiple images of the same region of sky, to help identify things such as asteroids. At around ...
The Kuiper Belt, the vast region at the edge of our solar system populated by countless icy objects, is a treasure trove of scientific discoveries. The detection and characterization of Kuiper Belt Objects (KBOs), sometimes ...
Our solar system has had a chaotic past. Earth and the other planets are now in stable orbits, but while they were forming they experienced drastic location shifts. Jupiter was likely much closer to the sun than it is now, ...
A trio of astronomers from Armagh Observatory & Planetarium and Centro de Astrobiología (CAB), CSIC-INTA has found that a white dwarf that was recently projected to make its way toward our solar system will not do so.
