In the bigger picture, "down" could be defined as being below the plane of the solar system, which is known as the ecliptic.

For large Main Belt asteroids, that break-apart point was set at a spin period of about 2.2 hours – a hard limit suggested by ...

Phobos, the oddly-shaped moon of Mars, has been captured in a series of stunning images gliding above the planet’s volcanic ...

NASA is backing a new generation of nuclear rockets that could compress the months-long journey to Mars into a sprint measured in weeks. The most ambitious concepts on the table promise crewed trips ...

The giant planets weren't always where we find them today. Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune formed in a more compact configuration and later underwent a violent reshuffling that scattered them to ...

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 ...

Nothing manmade has reached further from Earth than the Voyager series of spacecraft. Hurtling away from the sun at 38,000 miles an hour, the duo have now traveled over 12 billion miles, with Voyager ...

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 ...

How fast and in which direction is our solar system moving through the universe? This seemingly simple question is one of the key tests of our cosmological understanding. A research team led by ...

Material around Chiron, a small icy world in the far reaches of the solar system, may be taking shape into a ring system of its own. The rare event is unfolding in real time, giving astronomers a ...

The search for an unknown planet in our solar system has inspired astronomers for more than a century. Now, a recent study suggests a potential new candidate, which the paper’s authors have dubbed ...