Concentrated hydrogen in the galaxy’s spiral arms can be locked away in zircon crystals, providing startling clues about the Earth’s planetary formation.

When most of us think about what shaped our planet, we probably picture volcanoes, earthquakes, and huge continents slowly drifting apart (or back together again) over millions or billions of years.

Just decades after the first exoplanets were identified, our database of the distant worlds—monitored by the NASA Exoplanet Science Institute—has breached a new threshold. Now, astronomers have officially identified more than 6,

Early Earth lacked life’s essentials until a collision with Theia added them. This chance event made life possible. After the Solar System formed, it took no more than three million years for the proto-Earth to finish developing its chemical composition,

By 2015, NASA announced that Kepler had discovered its 1,000th exoplanet. 2016 was a banner year for exoplanet detections with nearly 1,500 in that year alone. The total number reached 5,000 in March of 2022. Now, NASA has announced that there are 6,000 confirmed exoplanets.

The Earth stands alone in the solar system as a habitable world, as far as we know. But that doesn’t mean we don’t get visitors, most often in the form of (usually harmless) asteroids. Some even choose to stick around for a while,

Much as we may treasure and proclaim our independence, we actually live in a protective bubble called the heliosphere.

Astronomers might be close to confirming the presence of an Earth-like atmosphere on an exoplanet for the first time, according to a new study.

The comet is known as 3I-Atlas and is currently 238 million miles from Earth. According to NASA, the comet is expected to pass the sun in October and continue hurtling toward Earth until December. The closest it will get to Earth on the current trajectory is 167 million miles away.