New work offers fresh evidence supporting the supernova shock wave theory of our solar system’s origin. According to one longstanding theory, our Solar System’s formation was triggered by a shock wave ...

New work from Carnegie’s Alan Boss and Sandra Keiser provides surprising new details about the trigger that may have started the earliest phases of planet formation in our solar system. It is ...

Our solar system’s origin story spans billions of years and involves clouds of gas, cosmic collisions, and planetary migrations that shaped the worlds we know today. While it may seem intuitive that ...

"The Solar Family" is an 11-minute educational film produced by Encyclopedia Britannica Films in 1936. It presents the evolution of the solar system through the lens of the planetesimal hypothesis, a ...

Simulations reveal that Jupiter’s rapid growth disrupted the early solar system, creating rings where new planetesimals formed much later than expected. These late-forming bodies match the ages and ...

Jupiter is the largest planet in our solar system (so large, in fact, that some scientists think it might have even consumed other worlds), a gas giant so massive that it shaped the orbits and ...

To better understand why the planets have variable compositions, we have to first understand the process of how stars form. While the composition of gas and dust in a precursor molecular cloud is ...

Measurements of this interstellar comet’s molecular makeup show an excess of heavy water molecules that is dramatically different from anything known to have ever formed around our sun ...