At the ragged frontier where the Sun’s influence gives way to the galaxy, a decades‑old spacecraft has stumbled into a furnace that theory did not predict. As Voyager pushes through the heliopause, ...

One of the biggest recent surprises in astronomy is the discovery that most stars like the Sun harbor a planet between the ...

Which way is ‘down’ has a different answer depending on where you are on Earth, in the solar system, in our galaxy and beyond ...

Our galaxy, the Milky Way, is home to multiple wonders. There is our biggest star, VY Canis Majoris, the column-like structures known as the Pillars of Creation, and, in the middle of it all, a ...

Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. The Oort Cloud, an expanse of icy bodies in the far reaches of our solar system, is shown here in a scene from "Encounters in the ...

Astrophysicists are mapping a vast, hidden structure in the gas around the Sun that behaves like a tunnel carved through interstellar space, potentially linking our solar system to distant stars.

Dark matter refers to material that does not absorb, reflect, or emit any electromagnetic radiation. Astronomers have ascertained the existence of dark matter through the gravitational influence it ...

When I was a kid, the solar system was simple. There were nine planets and they all orbited in more-or-less circles around the sun. This same sun-and-a-handful-of-planets scheme repeated itself again ...

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 ...

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 ...