Researchers have used the chemical fingerprints of zinc contained in meteorites to determine the origin of volatile elements on Earth. The results suggest that without ‘unmelted’ asteroids, there may not have been enough of these compounds on Earth for life to emerge.
The winds that help to form planets in the gaseous discs of early solar systems have been imaged for the first time by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) using the noble gases neon and argon.
In the search for life elsewhere in the Universe, scientists have traditionally looked for planets with liquid water at their surface. But, rather than flowing as oceans and rivers, much of a planet’s water can be locked in rocks deep within its interior.
Little ‘hurricanes’ that form in the discs of gas and dust around young stars can be used to study certain aspects of planet formation, even for smaller planets which orbit their star at large distances and are out of reach for most telescopes.
A team of astronomers have found that planet formation in our young Solar System started much earlier than previously thought, with the building blocks of planets growing at the same time as their parent star.
A new way of dating collisions between asteroids and planetary bodies throughout our Solar System’s history could help scientists reconstruct how and when planets were born.
Scientists have shown how the freezing of a ‘slushy’ ocean of magma may be responsible for the composition of the Moon’s crust.
Astronomers have developed the most realistic model to date of planet formation in binary star systems.
Scientists have suggested a new explanation for the abundance in intermediate-mass exoplanets – a long-standing puzzle in astronomy.
After analyzing four years of Kepler space telescope observations, astronomers from the University of Toronto, and of the University of Cambridge have given us our clearest understanding yet of a class of exoplanets called “warm Jupiters”, showing that many have unexpected planetary companions.
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