New work from Carnegie’s Alan Boss and Sandra Keiser provides surprising new details about the trigger that may have started the earliest phases of planet formation in our solar system. It is ...

Scientists were able to see the moment when planets began to form around a star. Astronomers have witnessed the birth of a solar system beyond our own for the first time. An international team of ...

Mercury has long baffled astronomers because it defies much of what we know about planet formation. A new space mission ...

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 ...

Here’s what you’ll learn when you read this story: Observations of the young HOPS-315 star system show an environment analogous to what our own nascent Solar System would have looked like billions of ...

Illustration comparing the planets of the Solar System and the Sun on the same scale. The planets are shown to scale relative to each other but their distances are not. From left to right the bodies ...

This video is an artistic representation of a newly discovered system, LHS 3154, which contains a planet far more massive for its sun than current models would predict. UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. – The ...

Stephen has degrees in science (Physics major) and arts (English Literature and the History and Philosophy of Science), as well as a Graduate Diploma in Science Communication. Stephen has degrees in ...

Super-Earths and sub-Neptunes, planets with sizes between Earth and Neptune, constitute approximately one-third of known exoplanets but are absent in our solar system. Their prevalence elsewhere and ...

The Sun's formation caused temperature differences in the surrounding disk of gas and dust. Inner, hotter regions formed rocky planets from less volatile elements. Outer, colder regions allowed ...