Newborn gas planets may be surprisingly flat, says new research

A new planet starts its life in a rotating circle of gas and dust, a cradle known as a protostellar disk. My colleagues and I have used computer simulations to show that newborn gas planets in these disks are likely to have ...

Webb looks for Fomalhaut's asteroid belt and finds much more

Astronomers used NASA's James Webb Space Telescope to image the warm dust around a nearby young star, Fomalhaut, in order to study the first asteroid belt ever seen outside of our solar system in infrared light. But to their ...

A surprisingly simple explanation for 'Oumuamua's weird orbit

In 2017, a mysterious comet dubbed 'Oumuamua fired the imaginations of scientists and the public alike. It was the first known visitor from outside our solar system, it had no bright coma or dust tail, like most comets, and ...

Searching for life with space dust

Following enormous collisions, such as asteroid impacts, some amount of material from an impacted world may be ejected into space. This matter can travel vast distances and for extremely long periods of time. In theory, this ...

Space dust as Earth's sun shield

On a cold winter day, the warmth of the sun is welcome. Yet as humanity emits more and more greenhouse gases, the Earth's atmosphere traps more and more of the sun's energy and steadily increases the Earth's temperature. ...

The world in grains of interstellar dust

Understanding how dust grains form in interstellar gas could offer significant insights to astronomers and help materials scientists develop useful nanoparticles.

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