A vast star-forming cloud of molecular hydrogen that is one of the largest single structures in the sky has been discovered hidden near the solar system. The crescent-shaped cloud—which its ...

Microscopic crystals extracted from meteorites could help settle a debate about the birth of our patch of the Milky Way.

The surprise discovery of a huge cloud of molecular gas — the stuff that forms stars — just 300 light-years away is opening up new ways to study the conditions that enable star birth. Such clouds are ...

The Oort cloud is a shell of icy objects that forms the very outskirts of our Solar System. Recently, a group of researchers discovered that the inner portion of the Oort cloud likely has spiral arms ...

Our solar system’s origin story spans billions of years and involves clouds of gas, cosmic collisions, and planetary migrations that shaped the worlds we know today. While it may seem intuitive that ...

New research may shine a light on part of outer space's great mysteries: the Oort Cloud. The Oort Cloud is the name given to a theorized group of potentially trillions of icy objects on the edge of ...

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 ...