Our solar system consists of the planets Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune, as well as countless asteroids and comets, that are gravitationally bound to the Sun.

A Flawed Formation: Our Solar System’s Strange Orbits If you were to draw up a solar system from scratch, you might imagine planets orbiting their star in smooth, circular paths, surrounded by a ...

This story appears in the July 2013 issue of National Geographic magazine. The dust speck had been plucked from the tail of a comet more than 200 million miles away. Now, under an electron ...