Scientists are starting to get a clearer picture of how Pluto’s strange, hazy atmosphere works. Their latest discovery, concerning waves rippling through the dwarf planet's atmosphere, means that ...

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 ...

In late August 2006, new discoveries upended a traditional, comfortable way of viewing our solar system: Scientists decided Pluto wasn’t a planet after all. Some space nerds like to mourn Pluto’s loss ...

In a post yesterday, I talked about the Moon orbiting the Earth, and the Earth’s gravitational sphere of influence, called its Hill sphere. If you have an object orbiting the Sun (like a planet, say), ...

Imagine throwing a baseball. Easy, right? Maybe you've already done it a few times. Now imagine throwing a baseball on the moon. Maybe you've seen enough videos of astronauts bouncing around up there ...

In 2015, NASA’s New Horizons probe flew by Pluto as it orbited the Sun in the solar system’s Kuiper Belt. New Horizons captured seminal images of the dwarf planet, including many highlighting one of ...

The debate over whether Pluto is a planet has been ongoing for years and there's no signs of that ending. New research out of the University of Central Florida argues against the 2006 definition that ...

Ceres, Eris, Makemake, Haumea, and Pluto are expected to have a new friend, Hygiea, inducted into our solar system’s dwarf planet club. Hygiea was long believed to be a large asteroid in the asteroid ...

Maybe Pluto is a planet after all. The icy ball at the outer edge of the solar system was considered a planet from its discovery in 1930 until 2006, when a global astronomy organization made the ...

Watch a ball throw on each planet in our solar system, plus Pluto and the moon, below. Imagine throwing a baseball. Easy, right? Maybe you've already done it a few times. Now imagine throwing a ...