Solar System

For a long time, Pluto was the farthest object we knew in the solar system, but it’s a cosmic stone’s-throw away compared to more recent discoveries. Now astronomers have confirmed the most distant world of all – the appropriately-named Farfarout.

Researchers at the Paris Observatory's Institute of Celestial Mechanics and Ephemeris Calculation have found that the unusual tilt of Saturn's axis is due to the periodic gravitational pull of its moons over the last billion years.

Based on isotope analysis of meteorites, scientists at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory have determined that our solar system may have formed much faster than previously thought.

Jupiter’s moon Europa is a fascinating world, with a global subsurface ocean encased in an icy shell and plumes of water that vent into space. A new study has simulated how these plumes might originate, revealing a surprisingly dynamic ice ball.

NASA and NOAA have confirmed that the Sun has entered a new solar cycle, with activity beginning to ramp back up from its minimum in December 2019. This next cycle is forecast to be rather quiet, continuing a long-term trend of reduced activity.

Harvard scientists have suggested that the Sun had a long-lost twin. An ancient binary solar system helps explain the strange structure of the Oort cloud, and possibly the hypothetical Planet Nine. Best of all, the team outlines how we could check.

Could there be a tiny black hole hiding in our own backyard? It’s been suggested that the hypothetical Planet Nine is actually a black hole, and now astronomers have proposed how we might find it in the next few years, using an upcoming telescope.

Researchers at CNRS in France and UNESP in Brazil have traced back the odd orbits of objects called Centaurs and found that 19 of them must have originated around another star, before being captured by the Sun’s gravity.

2I/Borisov is a comet from another star system, and now Hubble has taken the valuable opportunity to study its chemical makeup. The study reveals Borisov is very different to any local comet, giving hints about what kind of system it was born in.

‘Oumuamua, the first interstellar interloper detected passing through our solar system, raised many questions. According to a new model, the object’s unusual shape and trajectory may be the result of a devastating close encounter with a star.

Well over 100 new minor planets have been discovered in our solar system, in the darkness out beyond the orbit of Neptune. The discoveries were made by sifting through several years’ worth of data gathered by the Dark Energy Survey (DES).

Researchers have discovered the oldest material on Earth – and it’s not from Earth. Tiny grains from a meteorite that fell in Australia were found to be between 5 and 7 billion years old, meaning they predate our planet, the Sun and the solar system.