When comets pass close to the sun, they give off a residue of particles that make their way through the Earth's atmosphere. This dust, scientists have reported, might be older than the sun itself.

Scientists are following a trail of interstellar dust all the way back to the formation of the solar system. What we now know as the solar system began as a cloud of interstellar dust and gas. By ...

Two recent studies report discoveries of dust rings in the inner solar system: a dust ring at Mercury's orbit, and a group of never-before-detected asteroids co-orbiting with Venus, supplying the dust ...

Solar wind can form water on interplanetary dust, potentially adding to the primordial soup that gave rise to life on Earth, scientists say. On Earth, there is life virtually everywhere water is found ...

In 1999, US space agency NASA launched the Stardust spaceship with what seemed then to be extraordinary aims. The first task of the mission was to take pictures of a comet, before diving into its tail ...

New supercomputer simulations tracking the interactions of thousands of dust grains show what the solar system might look like to alien astronomers searching for planets. The models also provide a ...