The moon's pock-marked surface tells the story of its history. It's marked by over 9,000 impact craters, according to the International Astronomical Union (IAU.) The largest ones are called impact basins, not craters. Now, ...
New work led by Carnegie's Peng Ni and Anat Shahar uncovers new details about our Solar System's oldest planetary objects, which broke apart in long-ago collisions to form iron-rich meteorites. Their findings reveal that ...
Let's start at the beginning. Before humans, before Earth, before any of the planets existed, there were baby planets—planetesimals. Coalesced from dust exploded outward by the solar nebula, these blobs of material were ...
Planets develop from the dusty placental disk of material that surrounds a star after it begins to shine. The dust in that disk, according to most models, starts to stick to itself until clumps develop large enough to attract ...
(Phys.org)—A small team of researchers with members from institutions in France and Japan has found evidence in chondrules that suggest their existence came from collisions between planetesimals in the inner part of the ...
Astronomers have managed to link the properties of the inner planets of our solar system with our cosmic history: with the emergence of ring structures in the swirling disk of gas and dust in which these planets were formed. ...
Most meteorites that have landed on Earth are fragments of planetesimals, the very earliest protoplanetary bodies in the solar system. Scientists have thought that these primordial bodies either completely melted early in ...
When our sun was a young star, 4.56 billion years ago, what is now our solar system was just a disk of rocky dust and gas. Over tens of millions of years, tiny dust pebbles coalesced, like a snowball rolling larger and larger, ...
Astronomers have developed the most realistic model to date of planet formation in binary star systems.
Mars is a small planet. In fact, for scientists who do solar system modeling, the planet is too small. “This is an outstanding problem in terrestrial planet formation,” said Dr. David Minton from the Southwest Research ...
