planet formation

Even Stars Doomed to Die as Supernovae can Have Planets

90 percent of all exoplanets discovered to date (there are now more than 5000 of them) orbit around stars the…

2 years ago

Primordial Helium, Left Over From the Big Bang, is Leaking Out of the Earth

Something ancient and primordial lurks in Earth's core. Helium 3 (3He) was created in the first minutes after the Big…

2 years ago

Planets Have Just Started to Form in This Binary System

Astronomers have watched the young binary star system SVS 13 for decades. Astronomers don't know much about how planets form…

2 years ago

A Star Passed too Close and Tore Out a Chunk of a Protoplanetary Disk

When it comes to observing protoplanetary disks, the Atacama Large Millimetre/sub-millimetre Array (ALMA) is probably the champion. ALMA was the…

2 years ago

This is How You Get Moons. An Earth-Sized World Just got Pummeled by Something Huge.

Titanic collisions are the norm in young solar systems. Earth's Moon was the result of one of those collisions when…

2 years ago

Planets may Start Forming Before the Star is Even Finished

Planets form from the accumulation of countless grains of dust swirling around young stars. New computer simulations have found that…

3 years ago

Primordial Asteroids That Never Suffered Massive Collisions all Seem to be Larger Than 100 km. Why?

The early asteroids had a similar size, and this could be due to turbulence in the early solar system.

3 years ago

It's Starting to Look Like Super-Earths Really are Just Great big Terrestrial Planets

New research shows there is a divide between how gas planets and rocky worlds form.

3 years ago

Spiral-shaped Planetary Disks Should Be More Common. Giant Planets Might Be Disrupting Their Formation

Planetary system formation is a process that involves astounding and complex forces.  Humans have only just started trying to understand…

3 years ago

Huge Stars Can Destroy Nearby Planetary Disks

Westerlund 2 is a star cluster about 20,000 light years away. It's young—only about one or two million years old—and…

4 years ago