Planetary Formation
A Strange Planet has been Found that’s Smaller than Neptune But 50% More Massive
Astronomers have found another strange exoplanet in a distant solar system. This one's an oddball because its size is intermediate…
A Group of Meteorites All Came From a Destroyed Planetesimal With a Magnetic Core
Before our Solar System had planets, it had planetesimals. Scientists think that most of the meteorites that have struck Earth…
More Details On NASA’s VERITAS Mission, Which Could Go to Venus
Venus has always been a bit of the odd stepchild in the solar system. It’s similarities to Earth are uncanny:…
Pluto and Other Kuiper Belt Objects Started Out With Water Oceans, and Have Been Slowly Freezing Solid for Billions of Years
It seems unlikely that an ocean could persist on a world that never gets closer than 30 astronomical units from…
Planets Form in Just a Few Hundred Thousand Years
Astronomers like to observe young planets forming in circumstellar debris disks, the rotating rings of material around young stars. But…
Space Dust Delivered Water to Vesta, Could it Have Done the Same for Earth?
One of the most enduring questions about Earth regards the origins of its water. Where did it come from? One…
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…
This is an Actual Image of a Planet-Forming Disc in a Distant Star System
In 2017, astronomers used ALMA (Atacama Large Millimeter/sub-millimeter Array) to look at the star AB Aurigae. It's a type of…
Astronomers Are Sure These Are Two Newborn Planets Orbiting a Distant Star
Planet formation is a notoriously difficult thing to observe. Nascent planets are ensconced inside dusty wombs that resist our best…
More Pictures of Planet-Forming Disks Around Young Stars
Astronomy is advancing to the point where we can see planets forming around young stars. This was an unthinkable development…