Gregory Laughlin and Malena Rice weren't exactly surprised a few weeks ago when they learned that a second interstellar object had made its way into our solar system.
Earth's solid surface and moderate climate may be due, in part, to a massive star in the birth environment of the Sun, according to new computer simulations of planet formation.
A month before the planned launch of the joint ESA-JAXA BepiColombo mission to Mercury, two new studies shed light on when the innermost planet formed and the puzzle of its chemical composition. The findings will be presented ...
Detailed simulations of planetary formation are revealing how tiny grains of dust turn into giant planets and could shed light on where to find new Earth-like worlds.
A team of researchers from France and the U.S. has created a computer simulation of the development of the solar system focusing on Jupiter and the origins of its moons. In their paper uploaded to the arXiv preprint server, ...
Planets are thought to form in the disks of dust and gas found around young stars. But astronomers have struggled to assemble a complete theory of their origin that explains how the initial dust develops into planetary systems. ...
In their drive to set exploration goals for the future, NASA's Discovery Program put out the call for proposals for their thirteenth Discovery mission in February 2014. After reviewing the 27 initial proposals, a panel of ...
There is more oxygen in the core of Earth than originally thought.
There's something about our solar system that appears to be unusual. For some reason, most of our bigger planets are far away from our host star, while closer in are smaller, rocky worlds, including Earth itself.
Astronomers using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) may have detected the dusty hallmarks of an entire family of Pluto-size objects swarming around an adolescent version of our own Sun.
