As a result of the International Astronomical Union’s 2006 demotion of Pluto from planet to dwarf planet, our solar system ...

Ever wonder how NASA captures stunning images from deep space probes? Interplanetary scientist John Spencer takes us behind ...

One study in the journal Nature found organic compounds of unexpected complexity exist throughout the Universe. Thus complex organic compounds are not the sole domain of life. They can be made ...

No one has ever developed a truly reusable orbital heat shield, it’s extremely difficult to do so. Even the Shuttle’s heat ...

There’s a new frozen oddball orbiting the Sun, and it’s not your average space rock. It’s a planet—a minor one, to be fair—but one of the largest yet discovered and with an orbit around the Sun that ...

When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. For decades, scientists thought that Vesta was a protoplanet rather than an asteroid.

Astronomers have revealed new sources of meteorites within the solar system's asteroid belt, helping us understand where potentially hazardous asteroids might also originate. The researchers ...

this mega-asteroid broke apart in the Asteroid Belt, producing a chunk of rock that us ape-like inhabitants on the Solar System’s third planet would one day call “Bennu.” Eventually ...

In September 2023, a capsule containing the pristine asteroid ... our Solar System. Some of these bodies include Saturn’s moon Enceladus and the dwarf planet Ceres in the asteroid belt between ...

But not many people know that the other gas giants in our Solar System – Jupiter ... directly from the asteroid belt. Instead, the scientists argue, the concentration of impacts close to the equator ...

More massive than the asteroid belt by 20 to 200 times, it consists of small remnants of the solar system's formation—most are icy volatiles made up of molecules such as methane, ammonia and water.

Scientists believe Ryugu formed on the outskirts of the early solar system before migrating in toward the asteroid belt, eventually settling into an orbit between Earth and Mars. The team analyzed ...