Billions of years ago, in the frozen edges of the solar system, a violent impact shaped one of space’s oddest pairs. Instead of a typical planet-moon setup, Pluto and Charon became a binary system.

A region of active star formation in the constellation Ophiuchus is giving astronomers new insights into the conditions in which our own solar system was born. In particular, a new study of the ...

What can a newly discovered interstellar comet teach scientists about solar system formation and evolution? This is what a recent study presented at the National Astronomy Meeting 2025 hopes to ...

A research team led by University of Minnesota School of Physics and Astronomy Professor Yong-Zhong Qian uses new models and evidence from meteorites to show that a low-mass supernova triggered the ...

The James Webb Space Telescope has captured its first direct images of carbon dioxide in a planet outside the solar system in HR 8799, a multiplanet system 130 light-years away that has long been a ...

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 ...