The Earth formed much faster than previously thought

The precursor of our planet, the proto-Earth, formed within a time span of approximately five million years, shows a new study from the Centre for Star and Planet Formation (StarPlan) at the Globe Institute at the University ...

Earth and Venus grew up as rambunctious planets

What doesn't stick comes around: Using machine learning and simulations of giant impacts, researchers at the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory found that the planets residing in the inner solar systems were likely born from ...

Red dwarf stars might be best places to discover alien life

Red dwarfs are the most common type of star in the universe, and nearly every one of these stars may have a planet located in its habitable zone where life has the best chance of existing, a new study concludes.

Mars and Earth may not have been early neighbors

A study published in the journal Earth and Planetary Science Letters posits that Mars formed in what today is the Asteroid Belt, roughly one and a half times as far from the sun as its current position, before migrating to ...

Meteorites reveal story of Martian climate

Liquid water is not stable on Mars' surface because the planet's atmosphere is too thin and temperatures are too cold. However, at one time Mars hosted a warm and wet surface environment that may have been conducive to life. ...

Largest rocky world found

We thought we understood how big rocky planets can get. But most of our understanding of planetary formation and solar system development has come from direct observation of our own solar system. We simply couldn't see any ...

Astronomers discover a rare stellar disk of quartz dust

A research team of Japanese astronomers led by Dr. Hideaki Fujiwara (Subaru Telescope) has discovered a main-sequence star that is surrounded by a rare disk of quartz dust. Collisions of planetesimals, building blocks for ...

Flipping hot Jupiters: Why some planets orbit the wrong way

(PhysOrg.com) -- In the last few years astronomers have observed that in some extrasolar systems the star is spinning one way and the planet, a "hot Jupiter," is orbiting the star in the opposite direction. A Northwestern ...

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