For decades, school posters and science museum displays have grouped Uranus and Neptune together as “ice giants,” a tidy ...

New models suggest Uranus and Neptune may hold far more rock than expected, raising questions about how these distant planets formed.

The cold and remote planets originally earned their label of "ice giants" to contrast their interiors from those of Jupiter ...

The Gravity Assist Podcast is hosted by NASA's Director of Planetary Science, Jim Green, who each week talks to some of the greatest planetary scientists on the planet, giving a guided tour through ...

Inscrutable ice giants Neptune and Uranus have only a thin rind of windy weather over their fluid contents, a team of planetary scientists say. The research published in the journal Nature relies on ...

James is a published author with multiple pop-history and science books to his name. He specializes in history, space, strange science, and anything out of the ordinary.View full profile James is a ...

The gravity of a planet, its star, and the centrifugal force associated with the planetary orbit nearly balance in five regions near the planet’s path where an asteroid (or spacecraft) could orbit ...

You probably already know that gravity can greatly influence cosmic objects as they make their way through space. We see this constantly in how the Sun's gravity causes planets to orbit it. And even ...

Astronomers obsessed with solving the mysteries of dark matter or dark energy should remember: To make a great discovery, sometimes you need to know what you’re looking for. Take Michel Lalande. He ...

Because the solar system's contents formed from a disk around the sun, we would expect the orbits of everything orbiting the sun to keep relatively close to the plane of that disk. However, some don’t ...

Neptune, the farthest known planet in our solar system, is 30 times the distance of the Earth from the Sun. It is orbited by 14 moons, the largest of which is Triton. In Greek mythology Triton was a ...

For generations, school posters have sorted the Solar System into tidy boxes: four small rocky planets near the Sun, two huge ...