Journey beyond the asteroid belt to explore the solar system's majestic giants and mysterious outer reaches. We break down the science of Jupiter's eternal storm, Saturn's iconic rings, and the frozen ...

You might think we know the solar system pretty well, but there's a lot more to our cosmic neighborhood than initially meets the eye (or telescope). Most of the good stuff, such as the planets, moons ...

EVANSTON, Ill. — Except for the fact that we call it home, for centuries astronomers didn’t have any particular reason to believe that our solar system was anything special in the universe. But, ...

A new study published Nov. 24 in Nature Astronomy sheds light on what could be going on beneath the surface of these worlds and provides insights into how their diverse geologic features may have ...

In the remote outer reaches of planetary systems, far beyond the orbit of known planets, enormous and mysterious worlds silently loop around their stars. Some drift as far as 10,000 times the distance ...

Astronomers have long been puzzled by the orbital mechanics of objects that act in strange and largely unexplained ways in the outer reaches of the solar system, beyond the orbit of Neptune.

Theia, the world that helped form the Moon, came from the Solar System. Chemical clues in Earth and Moon rocks reveal this close origin.

An object eight times the mass of Jupiter may have swooped around the sun, coming superclose to Mars' present-day orbit before shoving four of the solar system's planets onto a different course. When ...

Lick Observatory’s Automated Planet Finder (above) and Shane Telescope (below) were used in the California Legacy Survey to conduct an exoplanet census. (Photos by Laurie Hatch) In the neighborhood ...

The Sun's formation caused temperature differences in the surrounding disk of gas and dust. Inner, hotter regions formed rocky planets from less volatile elements. Outer, colder regions allowed ...

This artist’s concept depicts one of the solar system’s inner planets slamming into Earth after being nudged on a collision course by a passing star. Such a world-shattering cataclysm is extremely ...