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Chaotic Wombs May Birth Wrong-way Planets

17 Nov , 2014 by

We’ve heard it time and time again. When it comes to new exoplanet findings, our conventional wisdom never holds. So the surprise that a batch of extrasolar planets are moving retrograde, orbiting in directions opposite to the way their stars are spinning, shouldn’t come as a surprise. Then again, maybe it should. These discoveries turned […]

ALMA Observes Binary Star System with Wacky Disks

30 Jul , 2014 by

When it comes to exoplanets, we’ve discovered an array of extremes — alien worlds that seem more like science fiction than reality. But there are few environments more extreme than a binary star system in which planet formation can occur. Powerful gravitational perturbations from the two stars can easily grind a planet to dust, let […]

Catching Planets in the Womb

17 Nov , 2010 by

[/caption] Awhile ago I wrote on the difficulty of finding young planets. There, I mentioned one team announcing the potential discovery of a planet a mere 1-5 million years old. But what are astronomers to do if they want to find even younger planets? The chief difficulty in this instance is that such planets would […]

Astronomy Without A Telescope – No Metal, No Planet

16 Oct , 2010 by

[/caption] A Japanese team of astronomers have reported a strong correlation between the metallicity of dusty protoplanetary disks and their longevity. From this finding they propose that low metallicity stars are much less likely to have planets, including gas giants, due to the shorter lifetime of their protoplanetary disks. As you are probably aware, ‘metal’ […]

Astronomy Without A Telescope – The Nice Way To Build A Solar System

24 Apr , 2010 by

When considering how the solar system formed, there are a number of problems with the idea of planets just blobbing together out of a rotating accretion disk. The Nice model (and OK, it’s pronounced ‘niece’ – as in the French city) offers a better solution. In the traditional Kant/Laplace solar nebula model you have a […]

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