The formation of our solar system from a singular nebula raises an intriguing question: why did each planet develop with a ...

The presolar nebula that would one day become the solar system condensed out of one such fragment over about 100,000 years.

Discover how a giant interstellar cloud known as the solar nebula gave birth to our solar system and everything in it. The solar system as we know it began life as a vast, swirling cloud of gas and ...

In a stunning astronomical discovery, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has unveiled a spectacular image of HH 30, a ...

We are staring "right down the barrel of it, which is really quite surprising to me — we're just lucky." One of the most photographed objects in the night sky is the Ring Nebula, wreckage of a ...

Artist rendition of the protosun and the solar nebula. Oxygen isotopes can be altered by ultraviolet light (gold arrows) in this environment as well. Short-lived radiogenic isotopes of aluminum ...

but would have needed to be heavy enough to cause a gravitational disturbance that had lasting effects on the Solar System’s disk and planetary orbits. Our s is thought to have emerged from a nebula—a ...

Earliest inner solar system planetesimals shaped the inventory of moderately volatile elements in terrestrial planets.

This story appears in the July 2013 issue of National Geographic magazine. The dust speck had been plucked from the tail of a comet more than 200 million miles away. Now, under an electron ...