Humans generally like stability. We are used to our small, predictable world: Every 24 hours, we rotate on our axis; every 365 days, we revolve around the Sun. We have followed this pattern for ...

Astronomers have announced the discovery of an amazing object in our solar system: 2012 VP113, an icy body with an orbit so big it never gets closer than 12 billion kilometers (7.4 billion miles) from ...

Far off at the most distant edge of the solar system is the Oort cloud, a shroud of ice and dust largely unchanged since the very beginning of the solar system. Looking at the Oort cloud is like ...

NASA's Pleiades supercomputer has provided fresh insights into the Oort cloud – a vast, theoretical spherical shell of icy objects that surrounds our solar system. For a long time, the Oort cloud's ...

While the Voyager spacecraft are constantly traveling out of the Solar System, sometimes they are getting closer to Earth.

Paul Weissman, lead scientist at the Table Mountain Observatory, part of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, offers the following answer. The Oort cloud is a huge spherical cloud of some 10 12 comets ...

The human mind may find it difficult to conceptualize: a cosmic cloud so colossal it surrounds the Sun and eight planets as it extends trillions of miles into deep space. The spherical shell known as ...

We like to think of our Solar System as a stable, mostly quiet place. Sure, we'll find that the planets and other bodies in their orbits will kick around a comet or asteroid every once in a while, but ...