A team of international astronomers reports in the Feb. 15 issue of Science the discovery of a solar system nearly 5,000 light years away with scaled-down versions of Jupiter and Saturn. Their findings suggest our galaxy could conceivably contain many star systems similar to our own. The National Science Foundation (NSF) sponsored the research.

A new 11-year cycle of heightened solar activity, bringing with it increased risks for power grids, critical military, civilian and airline communications, GPS signals and even cell phones and ATM transactions, showed signs it was on its way late Thursday when the cycle’s first sunspot appeared in the sun’s Northern Hemisphere, NOAA scientists said.

New observations by NASA's Cassini spacecraft indicate the rings of Saturn, once thought to have formed during the age of the dinosaurs, instead may have been created roughly 4.5 billion years ago when the solar system was still under construction.

NASA's Voyager 2 spacecraft has followed its twin Voyager 1 into the solar system's final frontier, a vast region at the edge of our solar system where the solar wind runs up against the thin gas between the stars.

The Voyager 2 spacecraft's Plasma Science instrument, developed at MIT in the 1970s, has turned up surprising revelations about the boundary zone that marks the edge of the sun's influence in space.

Sending an unmanned spacecraft to the outer fringes of the solar system requires extensive planning.

Using a computer model simulation, Haruichi Washimi, a physicist at UC Riverside, has predicted when the interplanetary spacecraft Voyager 2 will cross the “termination shock,” the spherical shell around the solar system that marks where the solar wind slows down to subsonic speed.

A NASA spacecraft observed lightning strikes at Jupiter's poles as it provided insights into the giant planet's dynamic atmosphere as well as volcanic activity on one of its moons, scientists have said.

Comets are made of the most primitive stuff in the solar system. As hunks of rock and ice that never coalesced into more planets, they give researchers clues to the evolution of solar systems.

The US space agency NASA is going to extraordinary lengths to find out more about the history of the solar system. The Dawn spacecraft was launched this morning on a 5 billion kilometre journey to the asteroid zone between Mars and Jupiter, and if all goes well it will enter the orbit of the asteroid Vesta in 2011.

A U.S. spacecraft named Dawn has blasted off from Cape Canaveral on an exploration mission to the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, NASA said.

Cassini scientists are poring through hundreds of images returned from the 10 September fly-by of Saturn's two-toned moon Iapetus.