Humanity has learned to fling machines to the edge of the solar system, but the stars remain stubbornly out of reach. The same physics that lets us orbit Earth and land probes on distant worlds also ...

The standard story of the origin of our solar system has gone like this: 4.6 billion years ago, a giant cloud of dust hung frozen in space. Then the explosion of a nearby star caused part of that dust ...

Earth may owe some of its properties to a nearby star that blew up just as the solar system was forming. This pattern, which saw a supernova bubble envelop the sun and shower it with cosmic rays, may ...