Settling on the Moon or Mars may be all the buzz. But how about we all move to an icy dwarf planet in the middle of the Solar ...

Pluto sits far out in the Solar System, small and dim, moving at a pace that barely fits human timelines. It was found in ...

Pluto's days, though they drag on a bit at around 153 hours, are nothing compared to its years. Pluto's orbit takes 248 Earth ...

Grab-and-go missions to asteroids have provided some of the most scientifically valuable samples since the Apollo missions—and they’re shaking up the search for life beyond Earth.

If you were to ask a group of dedicated amateur astronomers to list their favorite telescopic targets, few if any would mention asteroids. That's easy to understand. The typical asteroid lacks the jaw ...

At a young age, we're told how the sun warms Earth and makes life possible. That idea sticks with most of us for life. But when we want to understand things more thoroughly and we dig more deeply, we ...

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Pluto pulled Adeene Denton into its orbit during her undergraduate internship at the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston. It was summer 2015, when the New Horizons spacecraft zoomed past the ...

In an ancient star system expected to be stable and dormant, scientists found a 3 billion-year-old white dwarf star still tearing apart massive quantities of rock. “The rate we’ve seen rock consumed ...

FAQ – Asteroids & Comets Is Ceres an asteroid or a dwarf planet? I have seen it classified as both. On January 1, 1801, Giuseppe Piazzi discovered the first asteroid, 1 Ceres. In 2006, when Pluto was ...

Astronomers have discovered what they think may be another moon orbiting a distant dwarf planet called Quaoar. This small, icy, egg-shaped planet in the far reaches of our solar system, beyond Neptune ...

Using the James Webb Space Telescope, scientists have detected gas on the distant dwarf planet, Makemake. Credit: NASA / ESA / Southwest Research Institute / A. Parker illustration Scientists have ...