Today's atmosphere likely bears little trace of its primordial self: Geochemical evidence suggests that Earth's atmosphere may have been completely obliterated at least twice since its formation more than 4 billion years ...
Billions of years ago, in the giant disk of dust, gas, and rocky material that orbited our young sun, larger and larger bodies coalesced to eventually give rise to the planets, moons, and asteroids we see today.
What astronomers thought was a planet beyond our solar system has now seemingly vanished from sight, suggesting that what was heralded as one of the first exoplanets to ever be discovered with direct imaging likely never ...
Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) was part of an international team that recently discovered a relatively unpopulated region of the main asteroid belt, where the few asteroids present are likely pristine relics from early ...
A new theory for how rocky planets form could explain the origin of so-called "super-Earths"—a class of exoplanets a few times more massive than Earth that are the most abundant type of planet in the galaxy.
Before the Earth and other planets formed, the young sun was still surrounded by cosmic gas and dust. Over the millennia, rock fragments of various sizes formed from the dust. Many of these became building blocks for the ...
Astronomers have performed spectroscopic observations of a newly detected white dwarf star known as GD 424. Results of the observational campaign provide more insights into the atmosphere of this object. The study was presented ...
Scientists have long pondered how rocky bodies in the solar system—including our own Earth—got their metal cores. According to research conducted by The University of Texas at Austin, evidence points to the downwards ...
The element carbon and its compounds form the basics for life on Earth. Short-duration flash-heating events in the solar nebula prior to the formation of planets in our solar system were responsible for supplying the Earth ...
The first detection of an interstellar asteroid/comet-like object visiting the Solar system two years ago has sparked ideas about the possibility of interstellar travel. New research from the Technion–Israel Institute of ...
