A planetary system 116 light-years from Earth has a peculiar pattern. It could flip the script on how planets form, scientists say.

And the earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep. Sometimes, if the night is dark and clear enough, you can look up and see the Milky Way in its arc across the sky.

Artist impression of the planetary system with four planets,around a small red star,called LHS1903. Caption: Astronomers have long thought solar systems follow a simple pattern similar to our own: ...

Everything we know about the formation of solar systems might be wrong, says University of Florida astronomy professor Jian Ge and his postdoc, Bo Ma. They’ve discovered the first “binary-binary” – ...

Scientists from MIT and their colleagues have estimated the lifetime of the solar nebula — a key stage during which much of the solar system evolution took shape. This new estimate suggests that the ...

Astronomers have found a rocky planet where it should not exist, orbiting far from a cool red star. Could this strange ...

Most of our knowledge about the Solar System’s formation and evolution comes from the study of extraterrestrial rock samples called chondritic meteorites. These rocks, which are fragments of asteroids ...

Estimating ages of specific events is one of the most difficult problems in astrophysics. While we have a precise (and probably accurate) age for the solar system, we do not have precise ages for each ...

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

Illustration comparing the planets of the Solar System and the Sun on the same scale. The planets are shown to scale relative to each other but their distances are not. From left to right the bodies ...