You probably already know that gravity can greatly influence cosmic objects as they make their way through space. We see this constantly in how the Sun's gravity causes planets to orbit it. And even ...

James is a published author with multiple pop-history and science books to his name. He specializes in history, space, strange science, and anything out of the ordinary.View full profile James is a ...

Astronomers obsessed with solving the mysteries of dark matter or dark energy should remember: To make a great discovery, sometimes you need to know what you’re looking for. Take Michel Lalande. He ...

Nearly a century after Pluto’s discovery, astronomers are still hunting for mysterious planets beyond Neptune - including a ...

Astronomers have long speculated about the existence of a mysterious planet lurking far beyond Neptune, a world several times larger than Earth whose gravity could be shaping the outer reaches of our ...

Paul M. Sutter is an astrophysicist at SUNY Stony Brook and the Flatiron Institute, host of Ask a Spaceman and Space Radio, and author of How to Die in Space. He contributed this article to ...

Because the solar system's contents formed from a disk around the sun, we would expect the orbits of everything orbiting the sun to keep relatively close to the plane of that disk. However, some don’t ...

In 1906, astronomer and businessman Percival Lowell launched a search for "Planet X," a hypothetical giant planet orbiting the sun beyond Neptune. Lowell was convinced that Planet X existed based on ...

• Neptune had 13 known moons, including six small ones discovered by Voyager 2 in 1989. • Scientists were studying old Hubble Telescope pictures of the planet's moon and rings when they discovered a ...

Inscrutable ice giants Neptune and Uranus have only a thin rind of windy weather over their fluid contents, a team of planetary scientists say. The research published in the journal Nature relies on ...

It was exactly one year ago this week that astronomers found a brand-new planet in our solar system — a giant ball of ice and gas some 17 times the mass of Earth, orbiting the sun beyond Uranus.