Antarctica plays a crucial role in Earth's climate system by reflecting solar radiation back into space. The large white ice ...

Out in the Kuiper Belt, the massive doughnut of debris beyond Neptune, about one in 10 kilometer-scale objects have surprised scientists with their unexpected shape. Rather than resembling a ball, ...

Astronomers have long thought solar systems follow a simple pattern similar to our own: small, rocky worlds orbit close to ...

An exoplanetary system about 116 light-years from Earth could flip the script on how planets form, according to researchers ...

Since the 1990s, scientists have discovered approximately 6,100 planets outside our solar system, called exoplanets.

A newly studied solar system breaks the usual planet pattern, raising fresh questions about how rocky and gas planets form.

Space around the Sun contains far more than planets. Scattered through it are smaller bodies made of rock, metal, ice and ...

Gas giants possibly developed slowly in the solar system. They developed cores layer by layer within a disk of ice and dust ...

In 2023, NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft collected samples of 4.6-billion-year-old rocks from an asteroid called Bennu and ...

In a conventional system like our own, rocky planets such as Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars orbit closest to the host star. Farther out, gas giants ...

Astronomers have uncovered a distant planetary system that flips a long-standing rule of planet formation on its head. Around the small red dwarf star LHS 1903, scientists expected to find rocky ...

At a glance, Saturn’s rings appear calm and pristine when observed from afar. These rings are quite narrow and consist mainly ...