While Mercury, the wily planet of communication, doesn’t officially station retrograde until November 9, we’re locked and loaded to experience a lovely little preview of its hijinks courtesy of the ...

Last month, Google quietly killed off Google Sky Maps. But there’s still another way to virtually explore most of the solar system a la Google Maps: it’s called Google Maps in Space. Google Maps in ...

In the crowded early Solar System, young planets frequently collided and reshaped each other. But Mercury stood out. It formed unusually close to the Sun. Mercury’s days are longer than its years. It ...

The early years of our solar system were a period of unimaginable chaos and violence, a gravitational free-for-all where colliding planetary embryos competed for survival. In this tumultuous ...

When Terrence Dwyer received a knock on his door and a flyer for a solar panel system small enough to fit on his deck, he was quickly sold. Solar systems that plug into regular wall outlets have been ...

Researchers suspect that two meteorites found in the Sahara Desert in 2023 may originally have come from Mercury, which would make them the first identified fragments of the solar system’s innermost ...

Meteorites found in the Sahara Desert might be pieces of Mercury that broke off as the result of a collision when the Solar System was still forming. The meteorites had many parallels to the surface ...

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 ...

After Pluto was stripped of its planetary status in August 2006 by the International Astronomical Union (IAU)—on the grounds that it was too similar to newly discovered objects beyond Neptune’s ...