The solar system is a grand cosmic stage where each planet and moon plays a unique role in a story billions of years in the making. From Mercury’s shrinking surface and Venus’s runaway greenhouse effect to Earth’s life-sustaining balance and Mars’s ...

Planetary systems in the Milky Way galaxy tend to follow a particular pattern: rocky planets toward the center, closest to the host star, and gas planets toward the exterior. That’s how planets are organized around our sun, with rocky Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars first in the lineup, followed by the gaseous Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune.

Far from the Sun’s heat, orbiting the outer planets of the solar system, are moons with oceans of liquid water beneath their frozen surfaces. Keith Cooper finds out how planetary scientists are unravelling the mysteries of these frigid systems to see if ...

Homer Newell and the Origins of Planetary Science in the United States -- The Survival Crisis of the US Solar System Exploration Program in the 1980s -- Faster, Better, Cheaper: A Sociotechnical Perspective on Programmatic Choice, Success, and Failure in ...

A planetary system 116 light-years from Earth has a peculiar pattern. It could flip the script on how planets form, scientists say.