http://phys.org/ en-us Phys.org internet news portal provides the latest news on science including: Physics, Nanotechnology, Life Sciences, Space Science, Earth Science, Environment, Health and Medicine. (Phys.org)—Research by Loughborough University physicists casts new light on Saturn's moonlets – and could help solve some of the mysteries surrounding planet formation. http://phys.org/news280065567.html Space & Earth Thu, 14 Feb 2013 12:50:01 EST news280065567 (Phys.org)—An international team of astronomers led by Satoshi Mayama (The Graduate University for Advanced Studies, Japan) and Ruobing Dong (Princeton University) has made observations with the Subaru Telescope and captured the first vivid infrared image of a curved arm of dust extending over a hole on a disk around a young star—2MASS J16042165-2130284 (J 1604). This feature indicates the probable existence of unseen planets within the hole. The image shows the dynamic environment in which planets may be born and gives information about constraints on the distance at which planets can form from a central star. http://phys.org/news279532082.html Space & Earth Fri, 08 Feb 2013 08:10:02 EST news279532082 (Phys.org)—An international team of researchers from the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan (NAOJ) and the Japanese universities of Kobe, Hyogo, and Saitama used the Subaru Telescope to capture a clear image of the protoplanetary disk of the star UX Tauri A. The team's subsequent, detailed study of the disk's characteristics suggests that its dust particles are large in size and non-spherical in shape. This exciting result shows that these dust grains are colliding with and adhering to each other, a process that will lead to their eventual formation into planets. http://phys.org/news273315818.html Space & Earth Wed, 28 Nov 2012 09:03:47 EST news273315818 Astronomers using infrared data from the Subaru Telescope in Hawaii have discovered a "super-Jupiter" around the bright star Kappa Andromedae, which now holds the record for the most massive star known to host a directly imaged planet or lightweight brown dwarf companion. http://phys.org/news272537770.html Space & Earth Mon, 19 Nov 2012 08:56:22 EST news272537770 A large international team of astronomers led by Jun Hashimoto (National Astronomical Observatory of Japan) and Ruobing Dong (Princeton University) has used the High Contrast Instrument for the Subaru Next Generation Adaptive Optics (HiCIAO) to observe and examine PDS 70, a young star about 10 million years old with a mass similar to that of the Sun. Images captured from the observations clearly show a giant gap inside the protoplanetary disk, the largest ever found among lower mass stars similar to the Sun. A protoplanetary disk is where planets form, and the gravitational force of newborn planets may account for the huge gap between the inner edge of the disk and the central star. No single planet, regardless of how heavy or efficient it is in its formation, is sufficient to create such a giant gap. The researchers think that the gap in PDS 70's protoplanetary disk may have resulted from the birth of multiple planets. The high contrast images from the observations allowed the researchers to study the details of the disk, which then enabled them to directly reveal the site of formation of one and possibly more planets. The research team is now attempting to detect those planets. http://phys.org/news271870054.html Space & Earth Sun, 11 Nov 2012 15:27:50 EST news271870054 (Phys.org)—Solar systems with life-bearing planets may be rare if they are dependent on the presence of asteroid belts of just the right mass, according to a study by Rebecca Martin, a NASA Sagan Fellow from the University of Colorado in Boulder, and astronomer Mario Livio of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Md. http://phys.org/news271009799.html Space & Earth Thu, 01 Nov 2012 17:30:07 EST news271009799 According to the nebular hypothesis, star formation produces a gaseous protoplanetary disk around it, providing the environment and material for planet formation. Studying these systems can generate information regarding how and when planets formed, and is a hot topic in astrophysics. http://phys.org/news268557396.html Space & Earth Thu, 04 Oct 2012 08:16:45 EST news268557396 (Phys.org)—At first glance, the center of the Milky Way seems like a very inhospitable place to try to form a planet. Stars crowd each other as they whiz through space like cars on a rush-hour freeway. Supernova explosions blast out shock waves and bathe the region in intense radiation. Powerful gravitational forces from a supermassive black hole twist and warp the fabric of space itself. http://phys.org/news266591327.html Space & Earth Tue, 11 Sep 2012 14:08:53 EST news266591327 (Phys.org) -- With large swaths of oceans, rivers that snake for hundreds of miles, and behemoth glaciers near the north and south poles, Earth doesn't seem to have a water shortage. And yet, less than one percent of our planet's mass is locked up in water, and even that may have been delivered by comets and asteroids after Earth's initial formation. http://phys.org/news261755920.html Space & Earth Tue, 17 Jul 2012 14:59:11 EST news261755920 Scientists have performed a micro-probe analysis of the core and outer layers of a pea-sized piece of a meteorite some 4.57 billion years old to reconstruct the history of its formation, providing the first evidence that dust particles like this one experienced wildly varying environments during the planet-forming years of our solar system. http://phys.org/news218383737.html Space & Earth Thu, 03 Mar 2011 14:09:12 EST news218383737 A team led by University of Arizona astronomer Joshua Eisner has observed in unprecedented detail the processes giving rise to stars and planets in nascent solar systems. http://phys.org/news195470118.html Space & Earth Fri, 11 Jun 2010 11:00:01 EST news195470118 A new technique is being developed to detect water in the protoplanetary disks of other solar systems. If successful, it would help in our understanding of how habitable planets form. http://phys.org/news185729941.html Space & Earth Thu, 18 Feb 2010 16:00:02 EST news185729941 (PhysOrg.com) -- For the last 20 years, the best models of planet formation -- or how planets grow from dust in a gas disk -- have contradicted the very existence of Earth. These models assumed locally constant temperatures within a disk, and the planets plunge into the Sun. http://phys.org/news182539959.html Space & Earth Tue, 12 Jan 2010 17:33:09 EST news182539959