solar system formation

Space Diamonds are Even Harder Than Earth Diamonds

In a recent study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, an international team of researchers led…

2 years ago

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.…

2 years ago

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…

3 years ago

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.…

3 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

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…

4 years ago

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,…

4 years ago

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…

4 years ago

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…

4 years ago

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…

4 years ago