Ancient iron meteorites reveal that some of the Solar System’s first solid bodies were built mostly from tiny heat-forged rock beads called chondrules, while water-rich dust was largely excluded. The ...

When most of us learn about the solar system, it seems like a pretty well-ordered place. Our sun formed first, about five billion years ago, and the planets appeared a little later. As a very general ...

If the outer solar system’s first solid bodies had come with a recipe, it would have called for a generous helping of chondrules, millimeter-sized beads of rock forged by heat, and very little icy ...

Ancient grains inside one of the oldest known meteorites reveal that a surprisingly strong magnetic field existed during the solar system’s first 200,000 years. The discovery suggests magnetism worked ...

Asteroids are leftover pieces from the formation of our solar system about 4.5 billion years ago. In the beginning, ...

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 ...

Add Popular Science (opens in a new tab) More information Adding us as a Preferred Source in Google by using this link indicates that you would like to see more of our content in Google News results.

Everything we know about the formation of solar systems might be wrong, says University of Florida astronomy professor Jian Ge and his postdoc, Bo Ma. They’ve discovered the first “binary-binary” – ...

Before Earth existed — before the Sun ignited — ancient stars lived out their full lives, forged their elements, and died. A study published July 29 in Science Advances now shows that some of their ...

It's an exciting time for the fields of astronomy, astrophysics, and cosmology. Thanks to cutting-edge observatories, instruments, and new techniques, scientists are getting closer to experimentally ...

A new study published in The Astrophysical Journal has traced six chemically distinct families of the Solar System's oldest meteorites to a single ring-shaped dust trap just beyond Jupiter's orbit — ...

Unfortunately, this book can't be printed from the OpenBook. If you need to print pages from this book, we recommend downloading it as a PDF. Visit NAP.edu/10766 to get more information about this ...