New work offers fresh evidence supporting the supernova shock wave theory of our solar system’s origin. According to one longstanding theory, our Solar System’s formation was triggered by a shock wave ...

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 ...

"The Solar Family" is an 11-minute educational film produced by Encyclopedia Britannica Films in 1936. It presents the evolution of the solar system through the lens of the planetesimal hypothesis, a ...

Jupiter is the largest planet in our solar system (so large, in fact, that some scientists think it might have even consumed other worlds), a gas giant so massive that it shaped the orbits and ...

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 ...

To better understand why the planets have variable compositions, we have to first understand the process of how stars form. While the composition of gas and dust in a precursor molecular cloud is ...

Measurements of this interstellar comet’s molecular makeup show an excess of heavy water molecules that is dramatically different from anything known to have ever formed around our sun ...