At the ragged frontier where the Sun’s influence gives way to the galaxy, a decades‑old spacecraft has stumbled into a ...

One of the biggest recent surprises in astronomy is the discovery that most stars like the Sun harbor a planet between the ...

Our galaxy, the Milky Way, is home to multiple wonders. There is our biggest star, VY Canis Majoris, the column-like structures known as the Pillars of Creation, and, in the middle of it all, a ...

When I was a kid, the solar system was simple. There were nine planets and they all orbited in more-or-less circles around the sun. This same sun-and-a-handful-of-planets scheme repeated itself again ...

Astronomers may have finally worked out how planets between the size of Earth and Neptune – which aren't found in our Solar ...

The Oort cloud is traditionally thought of as a vast shell of perhaps trillions of icy objects encasing our solar system, serving as the final boundary between us and the dark reaches of interstellar ...

The workings of our solar system are roughly the same now as they have been for millions of years. Moons circle their planets, the planets circle the sun, the sun’s magnetic fields and sunspots wax ...

There’s a bit of a paradox about our galaxy: it’s both jam-packed with stars and cavernously empty. The Milky Way is crowded in the sense that it holds hundreds of billions of stars, as well as ...