The workings of our solar system are roughly the same now as they have been for millions of years. Moons circle their planets, the planets circle the sun, the sun’s magnetic fields and sunspots wax ...

Illustration comparing the planets of the Solar System and the Sun on the same scale. The planets are shown to scale relative to each other but their distances are not. From left to right the bodies ...

The first few exoplanets were discovered in the early 1990s. But it wasn’t until the early 2000s, when astronomers began carrying out large-scale, long-term surveys of other stars, that we started to ...