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 ...

The tests revealed traces of an ancient magnetic field preserved inside the grains. From those signals, the researchers ...

Every second, more than 3,000 stars are born in the visible universe. Many are surrounded by what astronomers call a protoplanetary disk—a swirling "pancake" of hot gas and dust from which planets ...

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 ...

The new study suggests that gravity was an important factor but that magnetism also played a role.

Ultraviolet “winds” from nearby massive stars are stripping the gas from a young star’s protoplanetary disk, causing it to rapidly lose mass, according to a new study. It reports the first directly ...

Imagine you want to measure the size of a room, but it’s completely dark. If you shout, you can tell if the space you’re in is relatively big or small, depending on how long it takes to hear the echo ...