What was here before the solar system?

The solar system is old. Like, dial-up-fax-machine-old. 4.6 billion years to be specific. The solar system has nothing on the universe. It's been around for 13.8 billion years, give or take a few hundred million. That means ...

How are planets formed?

How did the Solar System's planets come to be? The leading theory is something known as the "protoplanet hypothesis", which essentially says that very small objects stuck to each other and grew bigger and bigger—big enough ...

Telescope detects rare form of nitrogen in comet ISON

A team of astronomers, led by Ph.D. candidate Yoshiharu Shinnaka and Professor Hideyo Kawakita, both from Kyoto Sangyo University, successfully observed the Comet ISON during its bright outburst in the middle of November ...

Astronomers find solar storms behave like supernovae

(Phys.org) —Researchers at UCL have studied the behaviour of the Sun's coronal mass ejections, explaining for the first time the details of how these huge eruptions behave as they fall back onto the Sun's surface. In the ...

Image: March of asteroids across dying star

(Phys.org) —In an unexpected juxtaposition of cosmic objects that are actually quite far from each other, a newly released image from NASA's Wide-Field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) shows a dying star, called the Helix ...

Moon is younger than first thought

Improved age data for the Moon suggests that it is much younger than previously believed according to scientists presenting at a Royal Society discussion meeting entitled Origins of the Moon this week (23 September). Professor ...

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