Evidence is growing for a ninth planet lurking on the edges of the Solar System. Objects out there move in ways that suggest an unseen world is pulling on them, but new calculations suggest that there is no Planet Nine – these distant objects might just be jostling each other like bumper cars.
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When the solar winds emanating from our Sun meet interstellar space, they collide with material from beyond and limit the amount of harmful particles that come back the other way. NASA has ticked off a new mission to probe this protective bubble known as the heliosphere.
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An international team of astronomers has discovered an asteroid sharing Jupiter's orbit, that appears to have originated from another solar system. The imaginatively named asteroid 2015 BZ509 could have immigrated to our system at a time when our Sun was still embedded in a colossal star cluster.
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ESA has taken a “galactic census” of the Milky Way, unveiling the second major data release from the Gaia mission. The data release provides the most detailed map of our home galaxy, which includes data of nearly 1.7 billion stars, plus the orbits and positions of thousands of asteroids.
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It's been suggested that asteroids delivered water to a bone-dry early Earth, but whether that would work in practice remained unanswered. Now scientists at Brown University have tested the theory using a high-powered cannon, and found that a surprising amount of water is transferred in the process.
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As leftovers from the formation of the solar system, meteorites can act as time capsules. Scientists at the EPFL have now examined a piece of an asteroid known as 2008 TC3 and found diamonds that could only have come from a large, long-lost planet that roamed our neighborhood billions of years ago.
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About 70,000 years ago, an interstellar interloper brushed past less than a light-year from us. A new study has found that the effects of this close encounter are still felt today, as the orbits of hundreds of comets and asteroids still bear the star’s gravitational influence.
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You might have a pretty clear mental picture of what a planet is, but the official definition is surprisingly contentious. Now, an astrophysicist from Johns Hopkins University has proposed a revision to the definition of a planet, to help differentiate gas giants from brown dwarfs.
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Our visual perception of the Solar System has changed a lot since many of us sat in a high school science class. Let's take a walk through this new high-res version of our neighborhood of space.
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In 1996, scientists discovered the strangest stone ever found. Nicknamed the Hypatia stone, it was later found to be extraterrestrial, but unlike any known kind of meteorite. A new study has deepened the mystery even further, finding that Hypatia could be interstellar or predate the Solar System.
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