Observing the birth of a planetary system in real time is an extraordinary spectacle, offered for the first time by a team of ...

Astronomers have discovered the earliest seeds of rocky planets forming in the gas around a baby sun-like star, providing a precious peek into the dawn of our own solar system. It’s an unprecedented ...

Jupiter’s moon Io is the most volcanically active place in the solar system. Let me tell you just how volcanic it is.

Planetary scientists have long debated where the material that formed Earth comes from. Despite its location in the inner solar system, they consider it likely that 6–40% of this material must have ...

Our solar system is a smashing success. A new study suggests that from its earliest period — even before the last of its nebular gas had been consumed — Earth’s solar system and its planets looked ...

About 4.5 billion years ago, a colossal impact between the young Earth and a mysterious planetary body called Theia changed everything—reshaping Earth, forming the Moon, and scattering clues across ...

Add Popular Science (opens in a new tab) Adding us as a Preferred Source in Google by using this link indicates that you would like to see more of our content in Google News results. This article was ...

Every image you’ve seen of the solar system is a simplification — and a misleading one. Space isn’t flat, and there is no ...

The workings of our solar system are roughly the same now as they have been for millions of years. Moons circle their planets, the planets circle the sun, the sun’s magnetic fields and sunspots wax ...

Davide Farnocchia hunts down and tracks asteroids, and several years ago he saw something he couldn’t explain. Farnocchia works at NASA’s Center for Near-Earth Object Studies in California. Using ...

The standard story of the origin of our solar system has gone like this: 4.6 billion years ago, a giant cloud of dust hung frozen in space. Then the explosion of a nearby star caused part of that dust ...