Over millions of years, these objects grew larger, sweeping up material in their orbits and becoming the planets we know today. This model of solar system formation is known as the nebular hypothesis.

Today, it’s believed that Jupiter and Saturn, the largest planets, were the first to fully form, both within a few million ...

It’s huge. In fact, it’s astronomical! The Colorado Scale Model Solar System depicts the Sun, the planets, and the distances between them all on the same scale of 1 to 10 billion. That is, the real ...

Astronomers using planet-hunting satellites have discovered a rare solar system with six planets moving completely in sync with one another, as if they were untouched by any outside force since ...

"An early solar system containing five giant planets was proposed after numerical models indicated that this is more likely to reproduce the architecture of the current solar system, reproducing ...

They developed a 3D model that simulates how the solar system's orbital architecture may have evolved differently with the ...

The instrument, called the Habitable Zone Planet Finder or HPF, was designed to detect planets orbiting the coolest stars outside our solar system with ... disk than current models would predict ...

For the dwarf planet candidate, one trip around the sun takes over 24,000 years. Its orbit challenges a proposed path for a hypothetical Planet Nine.

The James Webb Space Telescope has observed two large planets at different stages of infancy - one with an atmosphere ...

[Related: What will we name the solar system’s next planet?] Batygin’s model suggests Planet 9 is somewhat bigger and farther: about five to six times the mass of Earth at 500 astronomical ...