Without water, life on Earth could not exist as it does today. Understanding the history of water in the universe is critical to understanding how planets like Earth come to be. Astronomers typically ...

I asked my friend Julie Ménard how Earth formed. She’s a planetary scientist at Washington State University. She told me it started with the Big Bang. That was nearly 14 billion years ago. “The Big ...

New research, funded by the NASA Lunar Science Institute (NLSI), theorizes that our early Earth and moon were both created together in a giant collision of two planetary bodies that were each five ...

Around 4.6 billion years ago, a young, hot star was born. The Sun formed from a cloud of gas and dust, and over time planetary bodies, including Earth and Mars, came to be. It’s unlikely that ...

A newly studied solar system breaks the usual planet pattern, raising fresh questions about how rocky and gas planets form.

The leading theory for how the Moon formed was that it was the product of a catastrophic collision between Earth and another planet the size of Mars 4.5 billion years ago, known as the giant impact ...