young stars
A Star Became 1,000 Times Brighter, and Now Astronomers Know Why
Astronomers were surprised in 1937 when a star in a binary pair suddenly brightened by 1,000 times. The pair is…
Webb Joins the Hunt for Protoplanets
We can't understand what we can't clearly see. That fact plagues scientists who study how planets form. Planet formation happens…
How We Get Planets from Clumping Dust
Our gleaming Earth, brimming with liquid water and swarming with life, began as all rocky planets do: dust. Somehow, mere…
ALMA Takes Next-Level Images of a Protoplanetary Disk
The ESO's Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) is perched high in the Chilean Andes. ALMA is made of 66 high-precision…
A Feline in the Heavens: The Smiling Cat Nebula
A stellar nursery sounds like a placid place where baby stars go about their business undisturbed. But, of course, a…
What Does the Milky Way Look Like?
A team from the Chinese Academy of Science (CAS) has revealed a new picture of the Milky Way's morphology.
TESS Shows That Even Small Stars Can Host Giant Planets
Can low-mass stars play host to giant, Jupiter-sized planets? Theories of planet formation suggest that it's highly unlikely. But a…
JWST Sees Furious Star Formation in a Stellar Nursery
The powerful James Webb Space Telescope is a mighty technological tool. Astrophysicists first conceived it over 20 years ago, and…
Planets Don’t Wait for Their Star to Form First
It looks like we may have to update our theories on how stars and planets form in new solar systems.…
Another Collection of Newly Forming Planetary Systems. This Time from the Gemini Planet Imager
Over the next decade, several very powerful telescopes will come online. Observing time on these 'scopes will be in high…