The constellation Ophiuchus represents the Serpent Bearer, a man wrestling a serpent, dividing the snake’s body in two parts.

Earth may owe some of its properties to a nearby star that blew up just as the solar system was forming. This pattern, which saw a supernova bubble envelop the sun and shower it with cosmic rays, may ...

Journey beyond Neptune to uncover the frozen, mysterious worlds that challenge everything we thought we knew about the solar system. From Pluto to Haumea and Makemake, these distant dwarf planets ...

Pluto pulled Adeene Denton into its orbit during her undergraduate internship at the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston. It was summer 2015, when the New Horizons spacecraft zoomed past the ...

A NASA mission, IMAP, and two more spacecraft that will study space weather are traveling through space atop a single SpaceX rocket. By Kenneth Chang A SpaceX rocket launched on Wednesday morning ...

Astronomers have uncovered a massive new trans-Neptunian object, 2017 OF201, lurking at the edge of our solar system. With an orbit stretching 25,000 years and a size that may qualify it as a dwarf ...

There’s a bit of a paradox about our galaxy: it’s both jam-packed with stars and cavernously empty. The Milky Way is crowded in the sense that it holds hundreds of billions of stars, as well as ...

The New Horizons spacecraft sends back its sensational snapshots of Jupiter, and its volcanic moon Io, before the mission's close encounter with Pluto (Photo by: Photo12/Universal Images Group via ...

Forbes contributors publish independent expert analyses and insights. An award-winning reporter writing about stargazing and the night sky. Astronomers have found a distant celestial body — ...

New James Webb Space Telescope data reveal Pluto's high-altitude haze is a key driver of the climate on the dwarf planet, offering clues to Earth's ancient atmosphere. When you purchase through links ...

In 2006, updated research led to Pluto being controversially demoted to dwarf planet status by the International Astronomical Union. The reasoning was that Pluto's location in the far-flung ...

Bad news, earthlings. Computer simulations of the solar system’s future reveal a new risk facing us all: The gravitational tug of a passing star could either cause another planet to smack into Earth ...