A planetary system 116 light-years from Earth has a peculiar pattern. It could flip the script on how planets form, scientists say.

Astronomers have found a distant world that challenges planetary formation theory, with a rocky planet where gas giants should be.

Astronomers have found a rocky planet where it should not exist, orbiting far from a cool red star. Could this strange ...

Scientists from MIT and their colleagues have estimated the lifetime of the solar nebula — a key stage during which much of the solar system evolution took shape. This new estimate suggests that the ...

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 ...

A newly studied solar system breaks the usual planet pattern, raising fresh questions about how rocky and gas planets form.

"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 ...