A study published in the journal Nature Astronomy challenges traditional explanations about the origin of the innermost planet in the Solar System and proposes a more likely scenario. The collision ...

This artist’s concept depicts one of the solar system’s inner planets slamming into Earth after being nudged on a collision course by a passing star. Such a world-shattering cataclysm is extremely ...

How did Pluto and its largest moon, Charon, form? This is what a recent study published in Nature Geoscience hopes to address as an international team of researchers led by the University of Arizona ...

A new study led by UNLV scientists sheds light on how planets, including Earth, formed in our galaxy—and why the life and ...

Pluto and Charon’s meet-cute may have started with a kiss. New computer simulations of the dwarf planet and its largest moon suggest that the pair got together in a “kiss-and-capture” collision, where ...

The early years of our solar system were a period of unimaginable chaos and violence, a gravitational free-for-all where colliding planetary embryos competed for survival. In this tumultuous ...

The “demoted” dwarf planet Pluto and its largest moon Charon make an unusual pair, and for decades, scientists have been discussing how the binary system—in which each mutually orbits the other—came ...