planet formation tagged posts

JWST reveals that newborn planets are racing against powerful winds and radiation before their supply of planet-building gas disappears. JWST has revealed that young planetary systems lose their planet-building gas through a changing mix of powerful jets, molecular winds, and radiation-driven outflows. As the disks age and their gas disappears, giant planets face a shrinking window to build massive atmospheres.

Planets take shape inside disks of gas and dust surrounding young stars, but the supply of gas they depend on is temporary...

A new Southwest Research Institute-led study proposes a solution to a longstanding puzzle in planetary science: What caused the concentration, assembly, and preservation of millimeter-sized, spherical mineral grains within the parent bodies of the most common meteorites? The work is published in the journal Science Advances.

Chondritic asteroids are ancient bodies that orbit the sun, while a chondrite meteorite is a rocky fragment that falls to Earth. Both contain primitive materials. Chondrite meteorites are largely made of chondrules—tiny, once-molten droplets of rock—embedded in a fine-grained matrix.

“While several mechanisms may have created the chondrules themselves, I have always been surprised by how homogeneous the chondritic asteroids seem to be,” said SwRI’s Hal L...

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...