These days, we are treated to glorious images of the cosmos through astrophotography and sophisticated three-dimensional visualizations of the universe. In the early centuries of astronomy, however, ...

Astronomers have spotted an intriguing cluster of objects in the Kuiper belt, the enormous, donut-shaped region of icy objects beyond the orbit of Neptune. This latest “inner kernel” was identified by ...

Astronomers might have found evidence of a structure located farbeyond Neptune, potentially giving us clues about the solar system’s primordial past. This discovery involves a dense concentration of ...

An accidental discovery might change how we think about one of the most mysterious structures in our solar system. The Oort Cloud, a large expanse of icy bodies revolving around the sun at a distance ...

The solar system once had five giant gaseous planets rather than the four it has today. That’s the conclusion from a computer simulation of the solar system’s evolution, which suggests the fifth giant ...

The Oort cloud is traditionally thought of as a vast shell of perhaps trillions of icy objects encasing our solar system, serving as the final boundary between us and the dark reaches of interstellar ...

The mysterious Oort cloud is the source of many of our solar system's comets, but astronomers still have no idea what it looks like. Now, new simulations may have given them a first glimpse. When you ...

The Kuiper belt, a disc of icy rocks on the outermost edges of the solar system, seems to have more structure than we thought. In 2011, researchers found a cluster of objects there on similar orbits ...