Beyond the edge of Neptune, a distant realm of icy debris known as the Kuiper Belt stretches deep into space. This frozen ...

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.

"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 ...

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 ...

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

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 ...

[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 ...

The aqueous planets are 218 light-years away in the constellation Lyra, says NASA. And they’re “unlike any planets found in our solar system ... of the planets to models for comparison.