"The Solar Family" is an 11-minute educational film produced by Encyclopedia Britannica Films in 1936. It presents the evolution of the solar system through the lens of the planetesimal hypothesis, a ...

Astronomers have spotted a planetary system being conceived from the swirl of gas and dust surrounding a star — giving us an unprecedented, real-time look at how our solar system would've formed some ...

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 ...

Everything we know about the formation of solar systems might be wrong, says University of Florida astronomy professor Jian Ge and his postdoc, Bo Ma. They’ve discovered the first “binary-binary” – ...

Astronomers still aren't exactly sure how planets get their start. When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here’s how it works. If you want to build a planet, ...

An image from the ALMA telescope array in Chile shows jets of silicon monoxide blowing away from the young star HOPS-315. The blue jet is moving towards Earth, and the red jet is moving away from us.

The discovery of a planet that is far too massive for its sun is calling into question what was previously understood about the formation of planets and their solar systems, according to Penn State ...

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 ...

Curious Kids is a series for children of all ages. If you have a question you’d like an expert to answer, send it to CuriousKidsUS@theconversation.com. Are planets in the solar system that are closer ...

A new study published in The Astrophysical Journal has traced six chemically distinct families of the Solar System's oldest meteorites to a single ring-shaped dust trap just beyond Jupiter's orbit — ...