It’s textbook astronomy. Planets form little by little, as material slowly congeals within the disk of gas, dust, and ice known to swaddle young stars. First, gravity gathers together bits of dust, ...

Around 4.6 billion years ago, a young, hot star was born. The Sun formed from a cloud of gas and dust, and over time planetary bodies, including Earth and Mars, came to be. It’s unlikely that ...

Berkeley – Astrophysicists at the University of California, Berkeley, and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) have exploded one of two competing theories about how stars form inside immense ...

An international team of astronomers including Stella Offner of The University of Texas at Austin has proposed a new method for the formation of aluminum-26 in star systems that are forming planets.

Starting from the upper left and moving clockwise from large to small scales: upper left —"spiral-like" system; upper right — "bar-like" structure; lower right — rotating infalling envelope; lower ...