Thanks to new measurements of very old meteorites, the current consensus on the Solar System's age is 4.5684 billion years old, with an uncertainty of 240,000 years—a tiny fraction of a percent.

Our solar system formed from a dense cloud of gas and dust that collapsed into a swirling disk of matter, most of which gravitated to the disk's center — which would eventually become the sun ...

Though Pluto has formally been considered a dwarf planet for almost two decades, it still has many lessons left for planetary scientists — including hints about how the solar system formed.

In 2014, Weiss’ group analyzed other ancient meteorites that formed within the solar system’s first 2 to 3 million years, and found evidence of a magnetic field that was about 10-100 times ...

But what exactly caused the formation of these chondrules remains unclear. “We have the same theories we had 50 years ago,” said study co-author and UChicago postdoctoral researcher Timo Hopp.

Analysis of an ancient meteorite suggests that rocky planets both near and distant from the sun may have formed at the same time, challenging current models of our solar system’s evolution.

Previous research suggests that small rocky bodies called protoplanets formed throughout the solar system, but those found beyond the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter came together a bit ...

Our solar system formed about 4.6 billion years ago, when a rotating cloud of dust and gas — the solar nebula — collapsed in on itself, forming the sun. But not all of that dust and gas became ...

But planetary scientist Wladymir Lyra says that even though it was downgraded to a dwarf planet, Pluto still has much to teach us about planet formation.

At the 2006 meeting of the International Astronomical Union in Prague, 424 members representing over 10,000 scientists passed a resolution to decide what the word ‘planet’ would actually mean in our ...