When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. An artist's illustration of the Voyager 1 probe travelling into the Oort Cloud. | Credit: Science ...

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 ...

Leonardo Testi and team investigate the initial conditions for planet formation in this special astronomy focus ...

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 ...

In a groundbreaking discovery, astronomers have, for the first time, observed the formation of a new solar system. Using a combination of data from the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array ...

Astronomers have spotted an intriguing cluster of objects in the Kuiper belt, the enormous, donut-shaped region of icy objects beyond the orbit of Neptune. This latest “inner kernel” was identified by ...

The Kuiper belt, a disc of icy rocks on the outermost edges of the solar system, seems to have more structure than we thought. In 2011, researchers found a cluster of objects there on similar orbits ...

New work from Carnegie’s Alan Boss and Sandra Keiser provides surprising new details about the trigger that may have started the earliest phases of planet formation in our solar system. It is ...