Astronomers have announced the discovery of an amazing object in our solar system: 2012 VP113, an icy body with an orbit so big it never gets closer than 12 billion kilometers (7.4 billion miles) from ...

In movies you usually see an asteroid belt full of rocks close to one another. In reality, this would be an unstable situation because objects that are close to one another will collide often as they ...

Humans generally like stability. We are used to our small, predictable world: Every 24 hours, we rotate on our axis; every 365 days, we revolve around the Sun. We have followed this pattern for ...

The Oort cloud is traditionally thought of as a vast shell of perhaps trillions of icy objects encasing our solar system, serving as the final boundary between us and the dark reaches of interstellar ...

Far off at the most distant edge of the solar system is the Oort cloud, a shroud of ice and dust largely unchanged since the very beginning of the solar system. Looking at the Oort cloud is like ...

Figure 1: Estimated time required for cometary nuclei to collide with 50% of their own mass in solids in the solar nebula as a function of distance from the Sun. The effect of such impacts will be to ...