Astrophysicists are mapping a vast, hidden structure in the gas around the Sun that behaves like a tunnel carved through interstellar space, potentially linking our solar system to distant stars.

At the ragged frontier where the Sun’s influence gives way to the galaxy, a decades‑old spacecraft has stumbled into a furnace that theory did not predict. As Voyager pushes through the heliopause, ...

There’s a bit of a paradox about our galaxy: it’s both jam-packed with stars and cavernously empty. The Milky Way is crowded in the sense that it holds hundreds of billions of stars, as well as ...

The Earth is our planet. It is one of eight planets that move around the sun, each in an oval shaped, elliptical orbit close elliptical orbitAn orbit that is the shape of an ellipse. An ellipse is ...

The Solar System remains a unique natural laboratory for exploring the processes that govern planetary formation, evolution and dynamics. Contemporary research continues to refine our understanding of ...

The Oort Cloud, an expanse of icy bodies in the far reaches of our solar system, is shown here in a scene from "Encounters in the Milky Way," a show at New York City's Hayden Planetarium that spawned ...