According to the most widely-accepted theory, planetary systems form from large clouds of dust and gas that form disks around young stars. Over time, these disks accrete to create planets of varying size, composition, and ...
On Nov. 29, 2021, NASA's Juno mission completed its 38th close flyby of Jupiter. As the spacecraft sped low over the giant planet's cloud tops, its JunoCam instrument captured this look at two of Jupiter's largest moons.
Since the first planet orbiting a star other than the sun was discovered in 1995, we have realized that planets and planetary systems are more diverse than we ever imagined. Such distant worlds—exoplanets—give us the ...
Nurseries for new planets, protostellar disks are oblate swathes of gas and dust that rotate about newly formed stars. The Earth and the other planets in the solar system were birthed from such a disk.
Discovering the properties of quantum systems that are made of many interacting particles is still a huge challenge. While the underlying mathematical equations have been long known, they are too complex to be solved in practice. ...
It burns, it drifts, it falls victim to insects. And it's shrinking.
The United Nations this week slammed corporate "greenwashing" and said organizations cannot claim to be net-zero while supporting fossil fuel projects.
The study of extrasolar planets has led to some astounding discoveries, many of which have defied the expectations of astronomers and challenged our notions about the forms planetary systems can take. For example, the discovery ...
A new model that accounts for the interplay of forces acting on newborn planets can explain two puzzling observations that have cropped up repeatedly among the more than 3,800 planetary systems cataloged to date.
The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), launched on Christmas Day 2021, is already transforming our understanding of planets in our solar system and far beyond. A versatile satellite observatory, JWST has a clear-eyed view ...
