We refer to our own solar system as the solar system, and in a sense, it is the only one of its kind. For centuries, our sun was known as Sol, latin for sun and the Roman equivalent of the Greek sun ...

In late winter, the zodiacal light is visible in the evening in the Northern Hemisphere (false dusk) and in the pre-dawn ...

NASA's Pleiades supercomputer has provided fresh insights into the Oort cloud – a vast, theoretical spherical shell of icy objects that surrounds our solar system. For a long time, the Oort cloud's ...

The fourth planet in the system is a rocky world, while the second and third ones are gas planets.

In space, the gravitational pull of massive objects is irresistible to smaller ones. Moons are locked in orbit around planets. Planets, asteroids and comets orbit more massive stars, and stars collect ...

Over the last week, we’ve been entertained by a pre-Halloween visitor from the depths of our solar system. It’s Comet Tsuchinshan-Atlas, a ghostly dirty snowball of rock, gas, and dust partially ...

When we think about orbits, we usually picture the Earth zooming around the sun. But does the sun just sit there? Or is it on its own journey? I asked my friend Guy Worthey. He’s a space scientist at ...

Fig. 2: The Radcliffe wave. The clouds that comprise this structure are highlighted in red and superimposed on an artist's illustration of the Milky Way. The location of the Sun is highlighted by the ...