solar system formation
ESA Gives Green Light on its Comet Interceptor Mission
Comets, with their long, beautiful, bright tails of ice, are some of the most spectacular sightings in the night sky.…
Ceres Probably Formed Farther out in the Solar System and Migrated Inward
When Sicilian astronomer Giuseppe Piazzi spotted Ceres in 1801, he thought it was a planet. Astronomers didn't know about asteroids…
Protoplanetary Disks Throw Out More Material Than Gets Turned Into Planets
When a young solar system gets going it's little more than a young star and a rotating disk of debris.…
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…
Young Stars can Evaporate Nearby Disks Before They can Form Planets
Many planetary systems may get snuffed out before they even get a chance to form, according to new research. The…
Exoplanetary System Found With 6 Worlds in Orbital Resonance
200 light-years away from Earth, there's a K-type main-sequence star named TOI (TESS Object of Interest) 178. When Adrian Leleu,…
How did the Earth get its water? The answer might be found on Mercury
I don't know if you've noticed by now, but the Earth is a little bit wet. How Earth got all…
The Sun Might Have Once Had a Binary Companion Star
A new study from the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics has bolstered the case for our Sun having a long-lost…
The Solar System Might Not Exist if There Wasn’t a Huge Galactic Collision with the Milky Way Billions of Years Ago
The Milky Way has a number of satellite galaxies; nearly 60 of them, depedending on how we define them. One…
We Know We’re Made of Stardust. But Did it Come From Red Giants?
We've all heard this one: when you drink a glass of water, that water has already been through a bunch…