MATISSE to shed light on the formation of Earth and planets

The MATISSE instrument is ready to be sent to Chile, where in the next few weeks it will be installed on the Very Large Telescope (VLT), the world's most powerful astronomical observatory. This achievement is the outcome ...

Stellar outburst brings water snowline into view

A violent outburst by the young star V883 Orionis has given astronomers their first view of a water "snowline" in a protoplanetary disk - the transition point around the star where the temperature and pressure are low enough ...

Astronomers find giant planet around very young star

In contradiction to the long-standing idea that larger planets take longer to form, U.S. astronomers today announced the discovery of a giant planet in close orbit around a star so young that it still retains a disk of circumstellar ...

ALMA reveals planetary construction sites

Astronomers using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) have found the clearest indications yet that planets with masses several times that of Jupiter have recently formed in the discs of gas and dust around ...

Exiled exoplanet likely kicked out of star's neighborhood

A planet discovered last year sitting at an unusually large distance from its star - 16 times farther than Pluto is from the sun - may have been kicked out of its birthplace close to the star in a process similar to what ...

Observing the birth of a planet

Astronomers at ETH Zurich have confirmed the existence of a young giant gas planet still embedded in the midst of the disk of gas and dust surrounding its parent star. For the first time, scientists are able to directly study ...

Spiral arms cradle baby terrestrial planets

New work from Carnegie's Alan Boss offers a potential solution to a longstanding problem in the prevailing theory of how rocky planets formed in our own Solar System, as well as in others. The snag he's untangling: how dust ...

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