By tracing the corkscrew wobble of two stars as they move through the sky, the Gaia space mission has discovered one new ...

Mercury takes only 88 Earth days to orbit the sun.

Worlds with liquid water could have formed just 200 million years after the big bang from the remains of the earliest ...

Exoplanets have captured the imagination of the public and scientists alike and as the search continues for more, researchers ...

An object eight times the mass of Jupiter may have swooped around the sun, coming superclose to Mars' present-day orbit ...

The number of planets that orbit the sun depends on what you mean by “planet,” and that’s not so easy to define ...

Cosmic forensic experts are reconstructing the magnetic field around an infant star from the planet-forming disk of gas and dust around it.

But of these planets, which is nearest to the sun? Mercury is a strange ... to hold on to a blanket of air around it, and even if an atmosphere did form, intense radiation from the close by ...

While the composition of gas and dust in a molecular cloud is fairly uniform, everything changes once a star begins to form.

The eight planets in our solar system orbit the sun in roughly the same plane, because they all originally formed from the same disc of debris around the sun. The line the sun traces across the ...

That said, finding a dark-sky area on a clear night towards the end of February will give you the best chance of spotting ...

For decades, astronomers have debated how the solar system's planets formed. However ... circles that are arranged concentrically around the sun and lie on the same plane. (If you viewed them ...