planet formation tagged posts

A new study led by UNLV scientists sheds light on how planets, including Earth, formed in our galaxy—and why the life and death of nearby stars are an important piece of the puzzle.

In a paper published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters, researchers at UNLV, in collaboration with scientists from the Open University of Israel, for the first time, modeled details about how the timing of planet formation in the history of the galaxy affects planetary composition and density. The paper is titled “Effect of Galactic Chemical Evolution on Exoplanet Properties.”

“Materials that go into making planets are formed inside of stars that have d...

Astronomers have identified an enormous “growth spurt” in a so-called rogue planet. Unlike the planets in our solar system, these objects do not orbit stars, free-floating on their own instead. The new observations, made with the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (ESO’s VLT), reveal that this free-floating planet is eating up gas and dust from its surroundings at a rate of six billion tons a second. This is the strongest growth rate ever recorded for a rogue planet, or a planet of any kind, providing valuable insights into how they form and grow.

“People may think of planets as quiet and stable worlds, but with this discovery we see that planetary-mass objects freely floating in space can be exciting places,” says Víctor Almendros-Abad, an astronomer at the Astro...

A study led by Jenny Frediani at Stockholm University has revealed a planet-forming disk with a strikingly unusual chemical composition: an unexpectedly high abundance of carbon dioxide (CO2) in regions where Earth-like planets may one day form.

The discovery, made using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), challenges long-standing assumptions about th...

New high-resolution images of protoplanetary disks in the Ophiuchus star-forming region, created with improved analysis. The resolution is shown by the white ellipse in the lower left of each panel, with a smaller ellipse indicating higher resolution. The white line in the lower right of each panel indicates a scale of 30 au. The evolution stage of the central stars progresses from left to right, and from top to bottom in the same row. (Credit: ALMA(ESO/NAOJ/NRAO), A. Shoshi et al.)

In a stellar nursery 460 light-years away, astronomers sharpened old ALMA data and spotted crisp rings and spirals swirling around 27 infant stars—evidence that planets start taking shape just a few hundred thousand years after their suns ignite, far earlier than anyone expected.

Signs of planet fo...