Exocomets may be as common as exoplanets

(Phys.org)—Comets trailing wispy tails across the night sky are a beautiful byproduct of our solar system's formation, icy leftovers from 4.6 billion years ago when the planets coalesced from rocky rubble.

Dust grains highlight the path to planet formation

(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 ...

Large water reservoirs at the dawn of stellar birth

(Phys.org)—ESA's Herschel space observatory has discovered enough water vapour to fill Earth's oceans more than 2000 times over, in a gas and dust cloud that is on the verge of collapsing into a new Sun-like star.

Hubble Catches Glowing Gas and Dark Dust in a Side-On Spiral

(Phys.org)—The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has produced a sharp image of NGC 4634, a spiral galaxy seen exactly side-on. Its disk is slightly warped by ongoing interactions with a nearby galaxy, and it is crisscrossed ...

Martian clay minerals might have a much hotter origin

(Phys.org)—Ancient Mars, like Earth today, was a diverse planet shaped by many different geologic processes. So when scientists, using rovers or orbiting spacecraft, detect a particular mineral there, they must often consider ...

New insight on Mars expected from new NASA mission

(Phys.org) -- On Aug. 20, NASA announced the selection of InSight, a new Discovery-class mission that will probe Mars at new depths by looking into the deep interior of Mars.

Astronomers discover a rare stellar disk of quartz dust

A research team of Japanese astronomers led by Dr. Hideaki Fujiwara (Subaru Telescope) has discovered a main-sequence star that is surrounded by a rare disk of quartz dust. Collisions of planetesimals, building blocks for ...

Image: Hubble peeks inside a stellar cloud

(Phys.org) -- These bright stars shining through what looks like a haze in the night sky are part of a young stellar grouping in one of the largest known star formation regions of the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), a dwarf ...

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