Related topics: stars ยท planets

Building a new planet

(PhysOrg.com) -- Astronomers over the past decade have made remarkable progress in the study of extrasolar planets; over 500 distant worlds are now confirmed. Meanwhile, as this active research community continues to discover ...

The quantum secret to alcohol reactions in space

Chemists have discovered that an 'impossible' reaction at cold temperatures actually occurs with vigour, which could change our understanding of how alcohols are formed and destroyed in space.

Saturn spacecraft samples interstellar dust

NASA's Cassini spacecraft has detected the faint but distinct signature of dust coming from beyond our solar system. The research, led by a team of Cassini scientists primarily from Europe, is published this week in the journal ...

ALMA reveals ghostly shape of 'coldest place in the universe'

At a cosmologically crisp one degree Kelvin (minus 458 degrees Fahrenheit), the Boomerang Nebula is the coldest known object in the Universe โ€“ colder, in fact, than the faint afterglow of the Big Bang, which is the natural ...

Image: The magnetic field along the galactic plane

While the pastel tones and fine texture of this image may bring to mind brush strokes on an artist's canvas, they are in fact a visualisation of data from ESA's Planck satellite. The image portrays the interaction between ...

Rosetta captures comet outburst

In unprecedented observations made earlier this year, Rosetta unexpectedly captured a dramatic comet outburst that may have been triggered by a landslide.

Behind the scenes of protostellar disk formation

For a long time the formation of protostellar disks โ€“ a prerequisite to the formation of planetary system around stars โ€“ has defied theoretical astrophysicists: In a dense, collapsing cloud of gas and dust, the magnetic ...

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