The ultimate purpose of PUNCH is to use its four instruments — three wide-field imagers (WFI) and a near-field imager (NFI) — ...

He wasn't wrong—the sun is 99.8 percent of the mass of the solar system. But what is that giant ball of fire in the sky? How ...

The Sun is a gigantic dynamo powered by hydrogen ... Voyagers 1 and 2 are on a one-way trip, sent forth to study the boundary between our solar system and interstellar space.

The robotic Cassini spacecraft which is now orbiting Saturn looked back toward the eclipsed Sun and saw a view ... into the deepest reaches of our solar system. These probes, unlike the Hubble ...

Q: Why do the planets all orbit the Sun in the same plane? —Randi Eldevik | Stillwater, Oklahoma Because of the way the Sun formed, explains David DeVorkin, a senior curator in the space history ...

But what’s it like on other planets? There are eight planets in our solar system. The closest one to the sun is Mercury, then it’s Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune.

In late 2017, a mysterious object tore through our solar system at breakneck speed. Astronomers scrambled to observe the fast ...

They also orbit near their stars, in many cases closer than Mercury is to the Sun. Our solar system, in contrast, appears to be different. “[Planetary scientists] have thought our solar system ...

A new model has been developed to simulate interstellar activity within our solar system and the nearby Alpha Centauri system ...

How wide are Saturn's rings? Find out with this visual tour through our solar system's most fascinating features. In contrast, the planets furthest from our sun - Neptune and Uranus - are bitterly ...

Even gargantuan Jupiter, with its whirling superstorms and volatile temperatures, has a soft side. A team of researchers recently documented stellar winds from the Sun, squishing the planet’s ...