The venerable Hubble observatory is going strong despite its decades in space and the advent of next-generation successors ...

The origin of super-Earths and sub-Neptunes has been revealed in a system of four young planets that are dramatically losing ...

EVANSTON, Ill. — Except for the fact that we call it home, for centuries astronomers didn’t have any particular reason to believe that our solar system was anything special in the universe. But, ...

A NASA Hubble Space Telescope observation program called OPAL (Outer Planet Atmospheres Legacy) obtains long-term baseline observations of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune in order to understand ...

When the Sun runs out of hydrogen fuel and expands into a red giant, it will eventually encompass the innermost planets of the solar system, out to about Earth’s orbit. Being closer to our enlarged ...

An object eight times the mass of Jupiter may have swooped around the sun, coming superclose to Mars' present-day orbit before shoving four of the solar system's planets onto a different course. When ...

In the distant future—about six billion or seven billion years hence—the sun will start to die, swelling up into a bloated red giant. In a span of several hundred million years it will blow away its ...

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 ...

The total solar eclipse on Aug. 21, 2017, as photographed from Madras, Oregon. The black circle in the middle is the Moon. Surrounding it are white streams of light belonging to the Sun’s outer ...