A planet in an unlikely orbit around a double star 336 light-years away may offer a clue to a mystery much closer to home: A hypothesized, distant body in our solar system dubbed "Planet Nine."
Astronomy
Dec 10, 2020
2
16382
A long time ago—roughly 4.5 billion years—our sun and solar system formed over the short time span of 200,000 years. That is the conclusion of a group of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) scientists after ...
Astronomy
Nov 13, 2020
54
37380
New studies of a rare type of meteorite show that material from close to the Sun reached the outer solar system even as the planet Jupiter cleared a gap in the disk of dust and gas from which the planets formed. The results, ...
Astronomy
Sep 8, 2020
0
430
Using some cosmic detective work, a team of researchers has found evidence that tiny pieces of asteroids from the inner solar system may have crossed a gap to the outer solar system, a feat once thought to be unlikely.
Space Exploration
Aug 6, 2020
1
3228
Astronomers using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope are finding that planets have a tough time forming in the rough-and-tumble central region of the massive, crowded star cluster Westerlund 2. Located 20,000 light-years away, ...
Astronomy
May 28, 2020
5
3700
A galactic visitor entered our solar system last year—interstellar comet 2I/Borisov. When astronomers pointed the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) toward the comet on 15 and 16 December 2019, for the ...
Astronomy
Apr 20, 2020
2
4251
The hypothesis that the solar system originated from a gigantic cloud of gas and dust was first floated in the second half of the 18th century by German philosopher Immanuel Kant and further developed by French mathematician ...
Astronomy
Mar 24, 2020
35
1016
The isotopic composition of meteorites and terrestrial planets holds important clues about the earliest history of the solar system and the processes of planet formation.
Astronomy
Dec 17, 2019
3
534
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.
Astronomy
Sep 26, 2019
8
1567
What happens inside a black hole stays inside a black hole, but what happens inside a black hole's "sphere of influence"—the innermost region of a galaxy where a black hole's gravity is the dominant force—is of intense ...
Astronomy
Aug 7, 2019
0
666
