Everything we know about the formation of solar systems might be wrong, says University of Florida astronomy professor Jian Ge and his postdoc, Bo Ma. They’ve discovered the first “binary-binary” – ...

Leonardo Testi and team investigate the initial conditions for planet formation in this special astronomy focus ...

Short-lived radioisotopes such as aluminum-26 influenced early solar system heat, water retention and the formation of Earth-like rocky planets, according to meteorite analyses and models.

New work from Carnegie’s Alan Boss and Sandra Keiser provides surprising new details about the trigger that may have started the earliest phases of planet formation in our solar system. It is ...

Aliza Chasan is a Digital Content Producer for "60 Minutes" and CBSNews.com. She has previously written for outlets including PIX11 News, The New York Daily News, Inside Edition and DNAinfo. Aliza ...

Mercury has long baffled astronomers because it defies much of what we know about planet formation. A new space mission ...

To better understand why the planets have variable compositions, we have to first understand the process of how stars form. While the composition of gas and dust in a precursor molecular cloud is ...