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 ...

Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. The Oort cloud is traditionally thought of as a vast shell of perhaps trillions of icy objects encasing our solar system, serving ...

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 ...

Paul Weissman, lead scientist at the Table Mountain Observatory, part of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, offers the following answer. The Oort cloud is a huge spherical cloud of some 10 12 comets ...