Humans generally like stability. We are used to our small, predictable world: Every 24 hours, we rotate on our axis; every 365 days, we revolve around the Sun. We have followed this pattern for ...
Astronomers have announced the discovery of an amazing object in our solar system: 2012 VP113, an icy body with an orbit so big it never gets closer than 12 billion kilometers (7.4 billion miles) from ...
Like the newly-identified 2014 UN271, the NEOWISE comet pictured here is a long-period comet originating in the Oort Cloud. Photo by NASA Johnson via Flickr under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 Amateur astronomers, ...
NASA's James Webb Space Telescope turned to the famed ringed world of Saturn for its first near-infrared observations of the planet in 2023. The Oort clous is thought to have been formed by remnants ...
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Astronomers searching for the faintest glimmers of light beyond distant Pluto say they’ve discovered a new dwarf planet – and that this planetoid’s movements hint that an invisible giant planet ...
New research suggests that the close passage of a nearby star,HD 7977, might have sent comets from the outer reaches of the ...
In 1906, astronomer and businessman Percival Lowell launched a search for "Planet X," a hypothetical giant planet orbiting the sun beyond Neptune. Lowell was convinced that Planet X existed based on ...
We like to think of our Solar System as a stable, mostly quiet place. Sure, we'll find that the planets and other bodies in their orbits will kick around a comet or asteroid every once in a while, but ...
Right now we can’t observe extrasolar Oort clouds, if they exist. (Not for lack of trying; we’ve been looking for them since 1991!) In fact, we can’t even directly observe our own Oort Cloud. We can ...
Spirals are a repeating theme in astronomy, with arguably the most famous example of a swirling armed structure being our ...