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Scientists think planets, including the ones in our solar system, likely start off as grains of dust smaller than the width of a human hair. They emerge from the giant, donut-shaped disk of gas and dust that circles young stars. Gravity and other forces cause material within the disk to collide. If the collision is gentle enough, the material ...
Oct 18, 2023 · The terrestrial planets (Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars) are characterized by their rocky composition and solid surfaces. On the other hand, the gas giants (Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune ...
- Clues from Our Past
- Looking to Our Future
- Building Our Knowledge of How Stars and Planets Begin
In cosmic phenomena, we see echoes of our distant past. Massive clouds of gas and dust condense into centralized protostars, that in turn emit powerful solar wind and bursts of radiation. A newborn star emerges from its molecular cloud nursery. Material left over from the star’s formation collapses into protoplanets. Each of these observations—now ...
Stars follow different paths as they age, determined by their mass, with the most massive burning their fuel exponentially faster. Smaller stars, like our Sun, live long lives. As they start to run out of hydrogen fuel in their core, they expand and turn red, becoming red giants. The byproducts of fusion collect in the core and, if the star is mass...
Our current understanding of how, when, and where stars and planets form and evolve is advanced through theory and observation. Data from current and next-generation telescopes will inform new computational models for stellar and planetary life cycles. These models are refined and may yield new theoretical discoveries which are in turn tested again...
Stars form from cold interstellar molecular clouds. As they collapse into protostars under the force of gravity, the remaining matter forms a spinning disk. Eventually the star stops accreting matter, leaving the disk in orbit around it. The leftover gas and dust inside that protoplanetary disk become the ingredients for planet formation.
May 13, 2024 · Takeaways. Planets form around young stars, and young stars form out of clouds of gas and space dust known as protoplanetary disks; some of the rocks in our solar system’s main asteroid belt contain evidence of these disks—which means they could have become planets themselves, if conditions were different.
- Jessica Colarossi
This planetary formation theory presumes that gas giants always occur in a solar system's outer orbits. Then, in 1995, astronomers discovered the distant planet 51 Pegasi b, a "hot Jupiter," or gas giant, that orbited very close to its sun. This discovery called for new theories, primarily that such planets must form far away from the central ...
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Apr 10, 2022 · In new research, we have spotted a hot, Jupiter-like gas giant in the process of forming around a star about 500 light-years from Earth. This rare babysnap of a planet actually in the process of ...
