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
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
In the early solar system, a "protoplanetary disk" of dust and gas rotated around the sun and eventually coalesced into the planets we know today.
Astronomy
Oct 15, 2021
2
5825
What are asteroids made of? Asteroids are made mostly of rock—with some composed of clay and silicate—and different metals, mostly nickel and iron. But other materials have been found in asteroids, as well.
Space Exploration
Sep 14, 2015
0
29
A pair of orbiting black holes millions of times the Sun's mass perform a hypnotic pas de deux in a new NASA visualization. The movie traces how the black holes distort and redirect light emanating from the maelstrom of hot ...
Astronomy
Apr 15, 2021
3
14451
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
Using the Atacama Large Millimetre/submillimeter Array (ALMA), in which the European Southern Observatory (ESO) is a partner, astronomers have unambiguously detected the presence of a disk around a planet outside our Solar ...
Astronomy
Jul 22, 2021
9
3585
Water was crucial to the rise of life on Earth and is also important to evaluating the possibility of life on other planets. Identifying the original source of Earth's water is key to understanding how life-fostering environments ...
Space Exploration
Sep 25, 2014
10
1
A white dwarf star can explode as a supernova when its mass exceeds the limit of about 1.4 solar masses. A team led by the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics (MPE) in Garching and involving the University of ...
Astronomy
Mar 24, 2023
1
5395
