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New observations from a NASA spacecraft show that the huge asteroid Vesta is a battered protoplanet left over from the solar system's early days, with a unique mix of characteristics unknown from any other space rock. [More]

A major solar flare that occurred Tuesday at 7:28 p.m. EST may yield a substantial aurora borealis (northern lights) over the next couple of nights. Scientists predict another solar flare early in the morning on March 8.

Extrasolar planets are targets for SETI investigations The count of exoplanets, those outside the Solar System, now has reached the multi-hundreds, with mucho mas inevitably to be counted. [More]

As dramatic exits go, it's on par with Major T. J. "King" Kong riding a falling nuclear bomb like a rodeo bull at the end of Dr

Instead of installing solar panels on your roof--how about just giving your house a new paint job? Of course you’d have to be sure to use solar paint. That’s what a group of Notre Dame researchers has created, detailing the recipe in the journal ACS Nano .

The mystery of why Mercury 's magnetic field is so weak may just have been solved: It is being stifled by the solar wind, researchers think. [More]

Inevitably, year-end lists invite plenty of debate and criticism, and Scientific American 's is no exception. Certainly, we could have included the discovery of new worlds beyond our solar system, including Kepler 22 b, an exoplanet in the "Goldilocks" zone of habitability, as well as the first known Earth-size exoplanets .

(PhysOrg.com) -- Researchers from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) have reported the first solar cell that produces a photocurrent that has an external quantum efficiency greater than 100 percent when photoexcited with photons from the high energy region of the solar spectrum.

Within our solar system , an extra giant planet, or possibly two, might once have accompanied Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune and Uranus. [More]

To become a world bathed in oceans of water and habitable, Earth first had to take a beating. A popular hypothesis holds that icy comets and asteroids pummeling early Earth delivered the planet's water from the icy outer reaches of the solar system.

Don't keep your solar user in the dark.

Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. Those are the gas giants, the four heavyweights of the solar system. But was there once a fifth

The solar leasing company has inked a deal to put solar panels on the housing in military bases in 33 states. SolarCity has had a big year, first with news that Google is creating a $280 million fund to finance its residential solar projects, and now with the announcement that it will double the amount of residential solar photovoltaic installations in the U.S. As part of Project SolarStrong , SolarCity will team up with the biggest military housing-privatization developers--the housing companies that manage homes on military bases--in the U.S.

By Eric Hand and Nature magazine Venus would seem to be a tempting destination for planetary probes: conveniently close, and an extreme laboratory for atmospheric processes familiar on Earth. So why won't NASA send a mission there

The end of the solar company--with $1 billion in investments and hundreds of millions in government loans--is bad for the U.S. economy.