And the earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep. Sometimes, if the night is dark and clear enough, you can look up and see the Milky Way in its arc across the sky.

NASA's New Horizons spacecraft captured this high-resolution enhanced color view of Pluto that is inserted beneath the Short Wave logo. The image combines blue, red and infrared images taken by the ...

A vast ring of rocky leftovers between Mars and Jupiter, the asteroid belt preserves clues to how the planets — and Earth ...

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 ...

New studies offer a clearer picture of how the outer solar system formed and evolved based on analyses of trans-Neptunian objects (TNOs) and centaurs. The findings reveal the distribution of ices in ...

The solar system is 4.54 billion years old, based on rock dating. Gas giants (Jupiter and Saturn) likely formed first. Ice giants (Uranus and Neptune) probably formed next. Rocky planets formed last, ...

You're probably familiar with how the solar system looks today. There are eight officially recognized planets located more or less on the same plane, orbiting the sun. But have you ever given a ...

In the early days of our solar system, when the Sun was still young and the planets were barely formed, Jupiter wasn’t the gas giant we see today. In fact, today’s Jupiter would look like a midget in ...

Earth and Mars were formed from material that largely originated in the inner Solar System; only a few percent of the building blocks of these two planets originated beyond Jupiter’s orbit. A group of ...

Though Pluto has formally been considered a dwarf planet for almost two decades, it still has many lessons left for planetary scientists —... Pluto isn’t a planet — but it gives us clues for how the ...

Pluto hasn't been a planet for almost 20 years. In the early 2000s, scientists discovered several objects of a similar size to Pluto. So, during the summer of 2006, members of the International ...