Jupiter’s icy moons may have been seeded with the chemical ingredients for life from the very beginning. An international ...

“Our findings suggest that Jupiter’s moons did not form as chemically pristine worlds,” Mousis said. “Instead, they may have accreted, or accumulated, a significant inventory of COMs at birth, ...

Southwest Research Institute was part of an international team that demonstrated how complex organic molecules (COMs), key ...

New research suggests that Jupiter’s icy moons may have formed with complex organic molecules already embedded in their building blocks.

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

Jupiter’s Galilean moons, Europa, Ganymede, Callisto, and Io, have long been subjects of intense scientific scrutiny, ...

Astronomers have captured planetary systems at a stage of development that is rarely observed. Extremely young, these systems consist of dusty debris disks that represent a crucial yet still poorly ...

Astronomers say they have discovered a distant planetary system with planets arranged in a surprising order, challenging long-standing ideas about how planets form. In our Solar System, the four ...

Astronomers have found a planetary system that seems to have formed inside-out. While most systems, like our own, have rocky planets closest to their star and gaseous ones further out, the LHS 1903 ...

A new paper in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society argues the simplest answer may work: contact binaries like Arrokoth can form directly during the gravitational collapse of a dense ...

NASA Detects ‘Pristine Ices’ From 3I/ATLAS As It Exits the Solar System — Why It Matters Pixabay 3I/ATLAS is back in the viral headlines, as it was for a fleeting moment in late 2025 and early 2026, ...