planet formation
Machine Learning is a Powerful Tool When Searching for Exoplanets
A new machine learning technique will help astronomers detect young exoplanets in disks surrounding other stars.
Jupiter is up to 9% Rock and Metal, Which Means it Ate a lot of Planets in its Youth
Jupiter is composed almost entirely of hydrogen and helium. The amounts of each closely conform to the theoretical quantities in…
We’ve Now Seen Planet-Forming Disks Around Hundreds of Young Stars. What Do They Tell Us?
Is our Solar System comparable to other solar systems? What do other systems look like? We know from exoplanet studies…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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.