Planetary systems such as our solar system take hundreds of millions of years to evolve. Since humanity has only existed for a sliver of that time, astronomers have only observed planetary systems at ...

Active small bodies—including comets, active asteroids, icy minor planets, and transitional objects—occupy a unique position in planetary science. As ...

The Solar System remains a unique natural laboratory for exploring the processes that govern planetary formation, evolution and dynamics. Contemporary research continues to refine our understanding of ...

Might the first moments of planet formation be more understandable than ever before? Fresh observations suggest that the creation of worlds such as our own is perhaps happening right in front of us, ...

Astronomers have found a distant world that challenges planetary formation theory, with a rocky planet where gas giants should be.

An instrument built by the University of Colorado Boulder will soon launch on a NASA space mission where it will aim to collect interstellar dust particles hurtling through space at an average of 16 ...

Astronomers have found a rocky planet where it should not exist, orbiting far from a cool red star. Could this strange “inside out” system rewrite how we think planets form?

Scientists say a nearby red dwarf star hosts a planetary lineup that looks like a mirror image of our own solar system, with rocky worlds bookending a pair of gas-rich planets. Around the star LHS ...

A vast star-forming cloud of molecular hydrogen that is one of the largest single structures in the sky has been discovered hidden near the solar system. The crescent-shaped cloud—which its ...