The Oort cloud is traditionally thought of as a vast shell of perhaps trillions of icy objects encasing our solar system, serving as the final boundary between us and the dark reaches of interstellar ...

Astronomers have spotted an intriguing cluster of objects in the Kuiper belt, the enormous, donut-shaped region of icy objects beyond the orbit of Neptune. This latest “inner kernel” was identified by ...

The Kuiper belt, a disc of icy rocks on the outermost edges of the solar system, seems to have more structure than we thought. In 2011, researchers found a cluster of objects there on similar orbits ...

The planets of our solar system orbit in a thin, orderly plane, but beyond this familiar disc lies a vast and complex cosmic environment that reshapes how we understand space itself. From the ...

Most of our knowledge about the Solar System’s formation and evolution comes from the study of extraterrestrial rock samples called chondritic meteorites. These rocks, which are fragments of asteroids ...