Active small bodies—including comets, active asteroids, icy minor planets, and transitional objects—occupy a unique position in planetary science. As ...

Planetary scientists have recently drawn a connection between the birth of Jupiter and the formation zone of Earth, suggesting a shared origin in the early solar system. This revelation not only ...

Might the first moments of planet formation be more understandable than ever before? Fresh observations suggest that the creation of worlds such as our own is perhaps happening right in front of us, ...

Peering through a cosmic keyhole at distant baby star, astronomers may have opened a new window on the deep past of our own solar system. Weighing in at 0.6 solar mass, HOPS-315 should someday grow to ...

The outer reaches of our Solar System continue to reveal a complex dynamical environment where the interplay of gravitational forces shapes the orbits of a myriad of distant bodies. Research in this ...

There’s a bit of a paradox about our galaxy: it’s both jam-packed with stars and cavernously empty. The Milky Way is crowded in the sense that it holds hundreds of billions of stars, as well as ...

Small bodies in the solar system have preserved information from different eras of the evolution of our solar system, from the composition of the presolar nebula that is preserved in cometary nuclei ...