Planets around other stars can help answer one of the greatest mysteries: How did we get here? How did the spinning disk of material left behind by our sun’s birth form our planet and its seven ...

Forbes contributors publish independent expert analyses and insights. An award-winning reporter writing about stargazing and the night sky. An object has been discovered orbiting the sun far beyond ...

A rare meteorite has revealed evidence of a massive lost world that once orbited the young Sun before being destroyed in a catastrophic collision. The discovery suggests some early planets formed from ...

A newborn planetary system is forming around HOPS-315, a protostar (one that recently formed) that sits some 1,300 light-years away in the constellation Orion the Hunter. This star isn’t in the ...

An exoplanetary system about 116 light-years from Earth could flip the script on how planets form, according to researchers who discovered it using telescopes from NASA and the European Space Agency, ...

For millions of years, a frozen wanderer drifted between the stars before slipping into our solar system as 3I/ATLAS—only the third known interstellar comet ever spotted. When scientists turned NASA’s ...

A newly discovered object speeding through our solar system is sparking excitement among astronomers because it’s not from around here. Believed to be a comet, the object is only the third celestial ...

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 ...

While life on Mars (and Venus) has long been an obsession for those wondering if we're alone, there are other places in our ...

Even at a glance, the planets in our solar system are wildly diverse. Huge and small, airless and densely packed with atmosphere, they have a wide range of characteristics distinguishing them. But if ...

James is a published author with multiple pop-history and science books to his name. He specializes in history, space, strange science, and anything out of the ordinary.View full profile James is a ...

The standard story of the origin of our solar system has gone like this: 4.6 billion years ago, a giant cloud of dust hung frozen in space. Then the explosion of a nearby star caused part of that dust ...