This artist’s concept depicts one of the solar system’s inner planets slamming into Earth after being nudged on a collision course by a passing star. Such a world-shattering cataclysm is extremely ...

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 ...

Emily Simpson has loved space since she was a 10-year-old kid celebrating her birthday at a planetarium. Now a recent Florida Tech graduate, she leaves with not only a dual degree in planetary science ...

There’s a bit of a paradox about our galaxy: it’s both jam-packed with stars and cavernously empty. The Milky Way is crowded in the sense that it holds hundreds of billions of stars, as well as ...

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 ...

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 ...

Forbes contributors publish independent expert analyses and insights. An award-winning reporter writing about stargazing and the night sky. Astronomers have found a distant celestial body — ...