Billions of years ago, in the giant disk of dust, gas, and rocky material that orbited our young sun, larger and larger bodies coalesced to eventually give rise to the planets, moons, and asteroids we ...

Earth’s crust looks solid from the surface, but it is broken into a shifting mosaic of slabs that slowly rearrange oceans and continents. Understanding how those tectonic plates first formed is one of ...

Recent simulations and research have unveiled a fascinating new insight into the history of the solar system’s terrestrial planets. For years, scientists speculated about how the rocky planets—Earth, ...

Crystals hidden in Australia’s oldest rocks have revealed new clues about how Earth and the Moon formed. The study suggests Earth’s continents didn’t begin growing until hundreds of millions of years ...

The formation of continents was an important step in Earth’s history. Continents and plate tectonics are connected to the planet’s habitability, and the same is true for the habitability of other ...

Scientists may finally be closing in on the origins of two colossal, mysterious structures buried nearly 1,800 miles inside Earth—hidden formations that have puzzled researchers for decades. New ...

This is roughly what the formation of the Earth in our solar system might have looked like. The birth of two planets (light brown dots) in a protoplanetary disc around the young star WISPIT 2 ...

The inner solar system may have formed differently from how we have long thought it must have. For decades, researchers have thought that the rocky planets formed from a single disc of dust and debris ...