Roughly 5 billion years ago Earth was in the process of forming. Gas and dust gathered with the young sun's protoplanetary disk, likely nudged a bit by the resonant gravitational pull of Jupiter and ...

Still from a simulation of a forming planetary disk. The images show the rotating inner disk along the top half, and the shadow it casts on the outer disk in the lower half. CREDIT Rebecca Nealon / ...

Using new observations with the ALMA telescope array in Chile, researchers have compiled the most precise map of three regions in the Milky Way's Central Molecular Zone to date, providing valuable ...

This photo shows the upper part of the water tornado model. The acrylic glas tank has a diameter of 50 centimetres and is illuminated with LED strips. The water forms a vortex whose surface shape ...

Many protoplanetary disks in which new planets are formed are much smaller than thought. Using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) scientists of the Leiden Observatory (the ...

A team of astronomers, led by University of Warwick in collaboration with researchers at MIT and McMaster, have developed a novel method to use the properties of dust rings around stars to estimate ...

Stars and their planets form when large molecular clouds collapse in on themselves. Gravity pulls the dust and gas into a violent spiral, which flattens out into a structure known as a protoplanetary ...