Astronomers have spotted a planetary system being conceived from the swirl of gas and dust surrounding a star — giving us an unprecedented, real-time look at how our solar system would've formed some ...

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 ...

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 have gotten very good at measuring the age of things using a variety of techniques, ranging from counting the rings on trees to using highly advanced radiocarbon dating, and much more. When ...

The newborn planetary system appears to be emerging 1,300 light-years away around a baby star known as HOPS-315. Planet-forming materials were first identified using NASA's James Webb Space Telescope.

A small, round piece of asteroid Ryugu (sample #91), called “S-lunar,” contains tiny particles (less than 1 mm) that will allow planetary scientists to study the magnetic signature of the early solar ...

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 ...

Illustration comparing the planets of the Solar System and the Sun on the same scale. The planets are shown to scale relative to each other but their distances are not. From left to right the bodies ...