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 ...

James is a published author with multiple pop-history and science books to his name. He specializes in history, space, strange science, and anything out of the ordinary.View full profile James is a ...

You probably already know that gravity can greatly influence cosmic objects as they make their way through space. We see this constantly in how the Sun's gravity causes planets to orbit it. And even ...

Astronomers obsessed with solving the mysteries of dark matter or dark energy should remember: To make a great discovery, sometimes you need to know what you’re looking for. Take Michel Lalande. He ...

Paul M. Sutter is an astrophysicist at SUNY Stony Brook and the Flatiron Institute, host of Ask a Spaceman and Space Radio, and author of How to Die in Space. He contributed this article to ...

Because the solar system's contents formed from a disk around the sun, we would expect the orbits of everything orbiting the sun to keep relatively close to the plane of that disk. However, some don’t ...

Inscrutable ice giants Neptune and Uranus have only a thin rind of windy weather over their fluid contents, a team of planetary scientists say. The research published in the journal Nature relies on ...

The outer planets generally have lots of little moons orbiting them. As a result, things can get a bit crowded. When moons orbit a planet in similar orbits, their gravitational tugs on each other can ...

Forbes contributors publish independent expert analyses and insights. The Universe is out there, waiting for you to discover it. From where we are in the Solar System, looking out at the distant ...

Nearly a century after Pluto’s discovery, astronomers are still hunting for mysterious planets beyond Neptune - including a ...

• Neptune had 13 known moons, including six small ones discovered by Voyager 2 in 1989. • Scientists were studying old Hubble Telescope pictures of the planet's moon and rings when they discovered a ...