The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is helping scientists uncover how planets form by advancing understanding of their birthplaces and the circumstellar disks surrounding young stars.
Major smashups between rocky bodies shaped our solar system. Observations of a similar crash give clues about how frequent these events are around other stars.
Launching in August 2022 and arriving at the asteroid belt in 2026, NASA's Psyche spacecraft will orbit a world we can barely pinpoint from Earth and have never visited.
The world's first 3D simulation simultaneously considering dust motion and growth in a disk around a young star has shown that large dust from the central region can be entrained by and then ejected by gas outflows, and eventually ...
Planets and their stars form from the same reservoir of nebular material and their chemical compositions should therefore be correlated but the observed compositions of planets do not match completely those of their central ...
Planetary systems form out of the remnant gas and dust of a primordial star. The material collapses into a protoplanetary disk around the young star, and the clumps that form within the disk eventually become planets, asteroids, ...
A unique stage of planetary system evolution has been imaged by astronomers, showing fast-moving carbon monoxide gas flowing away from a star system over 400 light years away, a discovery that provides an opportunity to study ...
An international team of planetary scientists led by astronomers at AOP have found an asteroid trailing behind Mars with a composition very similar to the moon's. The asteroid could be an ancient piece of debris, dating back ...
The trans-Neptunian object Arrokoth, also known as Ultima Thule, which NASA's space probe New Horizons passed on New Year's Day 2019, may have changed its shape significantly in the first 100 million years since its formation. ...
An international team of astronomers including Stella Offner of the University of Texas at Austin has proposed a new method for the formation of aluminum-26 in star systems that are forming planets. Because its radioactive ...
