Meteorites preserve fragments of the earliest solid materials that formed around the young Sun. The Solar System began as a cloud of dust and gas called the solar nebula — the Sun formed at the centre ...

The standard story of the origin of our solar system has gone like this: 4.6 billion years ago, a giant cloud of dust hung frozen in space. Then the explosion of a nearby star caused part of that dust ...

Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. Our solar system is mostly arranged along one plane in space, as in this not-to-scale artist's diagram. NASA/JPL, CC BY If you've ...

Some 4.6 billion years ago, when the solar system was born from a vast cloud that collapsed to form the sun and a surrounding disk of whirling gas, no planets yet orbited our star. Back then, besides ...