Stretching from Topsfield in Washington County to the St. John Valley along U.S. Route 1, it is the largest complete, designed-to-scale solar system model in the world.

Planets are bodies that orbit a star and have sufficient gravitational mass that they form themselves into roughly spherical shapes that, in turn, exert gravitational force on smaller objects around ...

Somewhere beyond Neptune, the Kuiper Belt is bent. Not by much, and not in a way any known planet can account for. A study published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society: Letters in ...

Dark comet 1998 SH2 spent 27 years cataloged as a routine asteroid before outgassing steered it invisibly off course, ...

In the cold, dark outskirts of planetary systems far beyond the reach of the known planets, mysterious gas giants and planetary masses silently orbit their stars—sometimes thousands of astronomical ...

A Jupiter-size exoplanet orbiting a dead star baffled astronomers. But the planet named WD 1856 b could preview the fate of our own solar system when the sun dies.

Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. University of North Carolina researchers have recently discovered a baby exoplanet that could challenge our current understanding ...

The International Astronomical Union defines a planet as a celestial body that orbits the sun, is massive enough that gravity has forced it into a spherical shape, and has cleared away other objects ...

Astronomers have made the first measurement of spin-orbit alignment for a distant ‘super-Jupiter’ planet, demonstrating a technique that could enable breakthroughs in the quest to understand how ...

Two teams of astronomers have found that extrasolar planet HAT-P-7b, discovered in 2008, has a retrograde or highly tilted orbit. On UT May 30, 2009, a Japanese collaboration team led by Norio Narita ...

The binary star system ν Octantis has long been considered hostile to planet formation. The discovery of a white dwarf in the system offers an alternative view. However, Cheng and colleagues observe ...