Herschel reveals a ribbon of future stars

Star formation is taking place all around us. The Milky Way is laced with clouds of dust and gas that could become the nursery of the next generation of stars. Thanks to ESA's Herschel space observatory, we can now look inside ...

Proto-planet has two masters

A Rice University researcher will discuss images that may show the formation of a planet—or a planetary system—around a distant binary star at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science ...

Image: Hubble captures DI Cha star system

Two stars shine through the center of a ring of cascading dust in this image taken by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. The star system is named DI Cha, and while only two stars are apparent, it is actually a quadruple ...

The role of "planet traps" in solar system formation

A team from the Astrophysics, Instrumentation and Modelling laboratory at Paris-Saclay (AIM – CNRS/CEA/Université Paris Diderot) has developed a new model that represents the evolution of protoplanetary disks over millions ...

US and Mexican astronomers develop new model of star formation

(Phys.org) —Astronomers working to estimate the rate of star formation inside murky distant galaxies, those shrouded in dust clouds that make it very difficult to study them, have published data from a brand new instrument, ...

Image: Our flocculent neighbour, the spiral galaxy M33

The spiral galaxy M33, also known as the Triangulum Galaxy, is one of our closest cosmic neighbours, just three million light-years away. Home to some forty billion stars, it is the third largest in the Local Group of galaxies ...

NEOWISE spots a comet that looked like an asteroid

Comet C/2013 UQ4 (Catalina) has been observed by NASA's Near-Earth Object Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (NEOWISE) spacecraft just one day after passing through its closest approach to the sun. The comet glows brightly ...

VLT clears up dusty mystery

A group of astronomers has been able to follow stardust being made in real time—during the aftermath of a supernova explosion. For the first time they show that these cosmic dust factories make their grains in a two-stage ...

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