Astronomers have managed to link the properties of the inner planets of our solar system with our cosmic history: with the emergence of ring structures in the swirling disk of gas and dust in which these planets were formed. ...
Scientists at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory evaluate early data the ESA/NASA Solar Orbiter spacecraft sent back to Earth as it observes comet Leonard, a mass of space dust, rock and ice just over half a mile across (1 ...
Launching in August 2022 and arriving at the asteroid belt in 2026, NASA's Psyche spacecraft will orbit a world we can barely pinpoint from Earth and have never visited.
Krypton from the Earth's mantle, collected from geologic hot spots in Iceland and the Galapagos Islands, reveals a clearer picture of how our planet formed, according to new research from the University of California, Davis.
The world's first 3D simulation simultaneously considering dust motion and growth in a disk around a young star has shown that large dust from the central region can be entrained by and then ejected by gas outflows, and eventually ...
Debris disks around main-sequence stars are tenuous belts of dust thought to be produced when asteroids or other planetesimals collide and fragment. They are common: more than about a quarter of all main-sequence stars have ...
It's been 70 years since physicist Enrico Fermi asked his famous question: "Where is everybody?" And yet, the tyranny of the Fermi Paradox is still with us and will continue to be until definitive evidence of extraterrestrial ...
Volatile elements, such as carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen and sulfur (S), are of profound importance for the formation, the differentiation and the habitability of a planet. However, today's Earth, though rich in life, contains ...
Planets and their stars form from the same reservoir of nebular material and their chemical compositions should therefore be correlated but the observed compositions of planets do not match completely those of their central ...
Giant planets like Saturn don't just tilt over all by themselves; something has to knock them over, or tug on them gravitationally, to push them off axis. Scientists expect that when new planets are born, they form with almost ...
