Solar Orbiter swept as close as 50 million miles (77 million km) to our sun's surface. Now scientists are at work testing the spacecraft’s 10 science instruments, including the 6 telescopes on-board. New images, to be released in mid-July, will be the closest of the sun ever captured.

New images from the fringes of our solar system. The fast-moving New Horizons spacecraft sees a parallax shift - a different apparent position against the background stars - for Proxima Centauri.

Researchers from Germany and the US have discovered an exoplanet less than twice the size of Earth orbiting at about the same distance from its star, making it the closest analog to the Earth-sun system known so far.

In the view of modern cosmologists, the Big Bang is the event that marked the birth of our universe. What was it - when was it - and what are modern theories?

Asteroid 2020 LD passed within the moon's distance on June 5, but wasn't discovered until June 7. It's the 45th known and the largest asteroid to sweep within a lunar-distance of Earth so far in 2020.

Astronomers at McDonald Observatory have confirmed a second planet - 7 times more massive than Earth - orbiting Proxima Centauri, the closest star to our sun.

What is the climate like on some potentially habitable exoplanets? Scientists have developed a new "decoder" to find out.

A new study of Mars' smallest moon Deimos, by scientists from the SETI Institute and Purdue University, suggests that the planet used to have rings a few billion years ago.

The theory of relativity describes black holes as being spherical, smooth and simple. Quantum theory describes them as being extremely complex and full of information. New research now proposes a surprising solution to this apparent duality.

The formation of the sun, the solar system and the subsequent emergence of life on Earth may be a consequence of a collision between our galaxy - the Milky Way - and a smaller galaxy called Sagittarius.