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 ...

Mercury has long baffled astronomers because it defies much of what we know about planet formation. A new space mission ...

Stars and planets are inextricably linked. They form together and stars shape the fate of planets. Stars create the dusty ...

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 ...

Roughly four and a half billion years ago the planet Theia slammed into Earth, destroying Theia, melting large fractions of Earth’s mantle and ejecting a huge debris disk that later formed the moon.

Could a comet passing through the inner solar system be older than the Sun itself? That question sits at the center of the ...

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 ...

Emily Simpson has loved space since she was a 10-year-old kid celebrating her birthday at a planetarium. Now a recent Florida Tech graduate, she leaves with not only a dual degree in planetary science ...

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 ...

The newly identified cluster of Kuiper Belt objects lies about 4 billion miles from the Sun, offering fresh clues about how ...

This article was originally featured on The Conversation. 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 ...