Planetary systems such as our solar system take hundreds of millions of years to evolve. Since humanity has only existed for a sliver of that time, astronomers have only observed planetary systems at ...

Far beyond Neptune, in the frozen depths of the Kuiper Belt, many ancient objects oddly resemble giant snowmen made of ice and rock. For years, scientists wondered how these delicate two-lobed shapes ...

A computer visualization maps small bodies in the solar system that are expected to be observed by the Rubin Observatory during the 10-year Legacy Survey of Space and Time. Red indicates near-Earth ...

Active small bodies—including comets, active asteroids, icy minor planets, and transitional objects—occupy a unique position in planetary science. As ...