Rather than slowly condensing over millions of years, the first building blocks of Earth and other planets may have formed ...

New studies offer a clearer picture of how the outer solar system formed and evolved based on analyses of trans-Neptunian objects (TNOs) and centaurs. The findings reveal the distribution of ices in ...

The standard story of the origin of our solar system has gone like this: 4.6 billion years ago, a giant cloud of dust hung frozen in space. Then the explosion of a nearby star caused part of that dust ...

Scientists from MIT and their colleagues have estimated the lifetime of the solar nebula — a key stage during which much of the solar system evolution took shape. This new estimate suggests that the ...