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 ...

New work offers fresh evidence supporting the supernova shock wave theory of our solar system’s origin. According to one longstanding theory, our Solar System’s formation was triggered by a shock wave ...

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 ...

Jupiter is the largest planet in our solar system (so large, in fact, that some scientists think it might have even consumed other worlds), a gas giant so massive that it shaped the orbits and ...

Astronomers are rethinking the solar system’s formation, with new research indicating Jupiter and Saturn formed millions of years before the inner planets. This sequence, shaped by the ice line and ...

Meteorites preserve fragments of the earliest solid materials that formed around the young Sun. The Solar System began as a cloud of dust and gas called the solar nebula — the Sun formed at the centre ...

To better understand why the planets have variable compositions, we have to first understand the process of how stars form. While the composition of gas and dust in a precursor molecular cloud is ...

Planetary scientists have long debated where the material that formed Earth comes from. Despite its location in the inner solar system, they consider it likely that 6–40% of this material must have ...

A researcher has used advanced models that indicate that the formation of Pluto and Charon may parallel that of the Earth-Moon system. Both systems include a moon that is a large fraction of the size ...

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Measurements of this interstellar comet’s molecular makeup show an excess of heavy water molecules that is dramatically ...