Are planets in the solar system that are closer to the Sun older than the ones further away? – Gavriel, age 10, Paducah, Kentucky A cloud of collapsing gas created our Sun, the first thing to form in ...

Realising that our solar system isn’t like most others out there has helped astronomers rewrite the story of how it formed ...

Discovery of oxygen raises new questions about how solar system formed. In this undated photo, Rosetta finds oxygen on comet 67P. ESA/Rosetta/NavCam – CC BY-SA IGO 3.0 — -- The European Space ...

A "domino effect" may occur in star systems whereby newly formed planets close to a star help shepherd dust and gas to create more planets farther out in the system. Astronomers using a mountain ...

A small, inconspicuous meteorite may be about to change our understanding of how and when our solar system formed. Tiny shavings from the meteorite Northwest Africa 12264 are challenging the long-held ...

Astronomers have witnessed the creation of a solar system for the first time. Data captured by the ALMA telescope in Chile and the James Webb Space Telescope showed planets forming around a star in ...

New studies offer a clearer picture of how the outer solar system formed and evolved based on analyses of trans-Neptunian objects (TNOs) and centaurs. The findings reveal the distribution of ices in ...

'We're showing that, everywhere we look now, there was some sort of magnetic field that was responsible for bringing mass to where the sun and planets were forming.' When you purchase through links on ...

What can the protoplanetary disk’s lifetime teach us about finding life beyond Earth? This is what a recent study published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters hopes to address as an international ...

About 4.6 billion years ago, the Solar System formed from a cloud of dust and gas collapsing in on itself due to gravity. The Sun, planets, and eventually Earth formed out of the cloud. But when did ...

To better understand why the planets have variable compositions, we have to first understand the process of how stars form. While the composition of gas and dust in a precursor molecular cloud is ...

Forbes contributors publish independent expert analyses and insights. An award-winning reporter writing about stargazing and the night sky. 2023 KQ14, nicknamed “Ammonite,” is a trans-Neptunian object ...