A recent study has revealed that the planet Jupiter devoured numerous smaller planets in the early days of the Solar System’s formation. This apparent cannibalism of its young siblings now sets to rest at least one debate regarding the formation of our system’s largest planet. Four and a half billionread more
The solar system appears to have been traveling through the molecular remnants of ancient supernovae for the past 33,000 years, at least according to the presence of a rare type of iron that shouldn’t even exist on Earth. Born in the fiery collapse of massive stars as they explode into supernovae,read more
Data collected from the New Horizons space probe’s 2019 flyby of a snowman-shaped object at the edge of the solar system has settled a debate about how the early solar system formed. Previously, there had been two prevailing theories regarding how this happened: either the matter in the proto-planetary disk smashed together violently—eventually forming the Sun, planets and other bodiesread more
Astronomers with the European Southern Observatory (ESO) have broken new ground in exoplanet research by directly observing a planet in another solar system using a new imaging technique. This new method provided enough detail about the far-flung planet to reveal the presence of a complex, planet-wide storm—and a strange puzzleread more