By Will Dunham WASHINGTON, Feb 4 (Reuters) - Jupiter, without a doubt, is the biggest planet in our solar system. But it turns out that it is not quite as large - by ever so small an amount - as scientists had previously thought.

“Textbooks will need to be updated,” study co-author Yohai Kaspi, a planetary scientist at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel, said in a statement. “The size of Jupiter hasn’t changed, of course, but the way we measure it has.”

The solar system’s most giant planet is slightly less of a giant than scientists once thought. Jupiter, a world that is so huge that it could hold 1,000 Earths, is eight kilometers narrower in width at its equator and 24 kilometers flatter at its poles than had been previously estimated,

A young star called V1298 Tau is giving astronomers a front-row seat to the birth of the galaxy’s most common planets. Four massive but extremely low-density worlds orbiting the star appear to be inflated precursors of super-Earths and sub-Neptunes.

The origin of super-Earths and sub-Neptunes has been revealed in a system of four young planets that are dramatically losing their thick atmospheres.

Astronomers are closing in on one of the most tantalizing possibilities in planetary science, evidence that a previously unknown world may be lurking in the outer reaches of the solar system. The latest work does not yet amount to a confirmed discovery ...

The discovery provides a precious peek into the dawn of our own solar system as well The discovery provides a precious peek into the dawn of our own solar system as well The discovery provides a precious peek into the dawn of our own solar system as well ...

NASA’s newly launched IMAP mission is set to tell us more about the boundary between our Solar System and interstellar space than ever before