When did the sun blow away the solar nebula?

The story of our solar system's origin is pretty well known. It goes like this: the sun began as a protostar in its "solar nebula" over 4.5 billion years ago. Over the course of several million years, the planets emerged ...

The chaotic early phase of the solar system

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 ...

How planetary nebulae get their shapes

About 7.5 billion years from now, our sun will have converted most of its hydrogen fuel into helium through fusion, and then burned most of that helium into carbon and oxygen. It will have swollen to a size large enough to ...

Image: Foreground asteroid passing the Crab Nebula

When astronomers use the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope to study the deep sky, asteroids from our solar system can leave their marks on the captured pictures of far-away galaxies or nebulae. But rather than be annoyed at ...

Mantle neon illuminates Earth's formation

The Earth formed relatively quickly from the cloud of dust and gas around the Sun, trapping water and gases in the planet's mantle, according to research published Dec. 5 in the journal Nature. Apart from settling Earth's ...

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