Astronomers have spotted an intriguing cluster of objects in the Kuiper belt, the enormous, donut-shaped region of icy objects beyond the orbit of Neptune. This latest “inner kernel” was identified by ...

If you travel far enough away from the Sun, the Solar System becomes a lot more populated. Out past the orbit of Neptune lies the Kuiper Belt, a vast, ring-shaped field of icy rocks. This is where ...

Could the icy moons of our solar system hold life beyond our planet? Keith Cooper looks at how planetary scientists plan to find out ...

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 ...

The Kuiper belt, a disc of icy rocks on the outermost edges of the solar system, seems to have more structure than we thought. In 2011, researchers found a cluster of objects there on similar orbits ...

The Oort cloud — the mysterious shell of icy objects at the edge of the solar system — might sport a pair of spiral arms that ...

Led by Amir Siraj, a doctoral student in astrophysics at Princeton University, the study reveals a tightly bound group of Kuiper Belt Objects (KBOs) near the known “kernel” structure; an established ...

The mysterious Oort cloud is the source of many of our solar system's comets, but astronomers still have no idea what it looks like. Now, new simulations may have given them a first glimpse. When you ...