Using ESO's Very Large Telescope (VLT), an international team of astronomers has uncovered the presence of a low-mass stellar companion to a young variable star known as RZ Piscium. The newly detected object is about eight ...
Astronomers using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope are finding that planets have a tough time forming in the rough-and-tumble central region of the massive, crowded star cluster Westerlund 2. Located 20,000 light-years away, ...
Let's start at the beginning. Before humans, before Earth, before any of the planets existed, there were baby planets—planetesimals. Coalesced from dust exploded outward by the solar nebula, these blobs of material were ...
What astronomers thought was a planet beyond our solar system has now seemingly vanished from sight, suggesting that what was heralded as one of the first exoplanets to ever be discovered with direct imaging likely never ...
In Jessica Barnes' palm is an ancient, coin-sized mosaic of glass, minerals and rocks as thick as a strand of wool fiber. It is a slice of Martian meteorite, known as Northwest Africa 7034 or Black Beauty, that was formed ...
The hypothesis that the solar system originated from a gigantic cloud of gas and dust was first floated in the second half of the 18th century by German philosopher Immanuel Kant and further developed by French mathematician ...
The solar system formed approximately 4.5 billion years ago. Numerous fragments that bear witness to this early era orbit the sun as asteroids. Around three-quarters of these are carbon-rich C-type asteroids, such as 162173 ...
Ancient rocks from Greenland have shown that the elements necessary for the evolution of life did not come to Earth until very late in the planet's formation—much later than previously thought.
Ninety years ago today, Clyde Tombaugh, a young astronomer working at Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona, discovered Pluto. In doing so he unknowingly opened the door to the vast "third zone" of the solar system we ...
A fireball in the sky, accompanied by a bang, amazed hundreds of eyewitnesses in northern Germany in mid-September last year. The reason for the spectacle was a meteoroid entering the Earth's atmosphere and partially burning ...
