Our solar system is a weird place. Much more than a home to eight planets, it’s filled with a myriad of fascinating other smaller bodies, including moons, asteroids, and comets. In recent decades, ...

Comet 3I/ATLAS, the third known interstellar object ever detected passing through our solar system, carries a chemical signature that does not match what astronomers typically see in comets born ...

Samples from Ryugu, a small, near-Earth asteroid, preserve natural remanent magnetization (NRM) from the early history of the solar system. However, despite multiple studies, there is currently no ...

Microscopic crystals extracted from meteorites could help settle a debate about the birth of our patch of the Milky Way.

Strange objects from other star systems are visiting our solar system. These interstellar visitors are scientifically valuable but disappear quickly. Scientists are calling for a global response ...

Astronomers have uncovered evidence of a spectacular collision of two planets within the confines of a faraway solar system, providing us with a rare .

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 ...

Introduction: NASA's solar system exploration paradigm : the first fifty years and a look at the next fifty / James L. Green and Kristen J. Erickson -- Part I. Overview. Exploring the Solar System : ...

A new paper in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society argues the simplest answer may work: contact binaries like Arrokoth can form directly during the gravitational collapse of a dense ...

Scientists have long believed that comets and a type of very primitive meteorite called carbonaceous chondrites were the sources of early Earth’s volatile elements — which include hydrogen, nitrogen, ...

Oh, we humans do love a cleanly defined boundary, don’t we? They make things easier, after all. If we’re trying to categorize something, knowing what labeled bin to put it in is handy. If we’re ...