We’re joining forces with our colleagues at Spaceflight Now to provide live coverage of the New Horizons spacecraft’s flyby of 2014 MU69 — also known as Ultima Thule — in the Kuiper Belt a billion miles beyond Pluto. Text updates will appear automatically below. Follow us on Twitter.
News
Largest planets likely formed first from icy “planetary pebbles”
Researchers at Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) and Queen’s University in Canada have unravelled the mystery of how Jupiter and Saturn likely formed using computer simulations. The discovery, which changes our view of how all planets might have formed, also suggests that the gas giants in the solar system probably formed before the terrestrial planets.
Top Stories 2015
No. 1 New Horizons at Pluto
The long-awaited fly-by of Pluto by the New Horizons spacecraft, on 14 July 2015, was an event 85 years in the making, following Pluto’s discovery by Clyde Tombaugh in 1930. Since then, Pluto has gone from planet to dwarf planet, but despite protestations from the New Horizons team, its reclassification never really changed the mission or the importance of what it would find at Pluto.