And the earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep. Sometimes, if the night is dark and clear enough, you can look up and see the Milky Way in its arc across the sky.

A planetary system 116 light-years from Earth has a peculiar pattern. It could flip the script on how planets form, scientists say.

Artist impression of the planetary system with four planets,around a small red star,called LHS1903. Caption: Astronomers have long thought solar systems follow a simple pattern similar to our own: ...

Astronomers have found a distant world that challenges planetary formation theory, with a rocky planet where gas giants should be.

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” – ...

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 ...

Astronomers have found a compact solar system whose planets line up in a way that, according to current models, should not be possible. Around the small star LHS 1903, a dense rocky world orbits on ...

A newly studied solar system breaks the usual planet pattern, raising fresh questions about how rocky and gas planets form.

Estimating ages of specific events is one of the most difficult problems in astrophysics. While we have a precise (and probably accurate) age for the solar system, we do not have precise ages for each ...