Accretion processes in protoplanetary disks produce a diversity of small bodies. In our solar system, small bodies played a crucial role in both early and late accretion of planets, after potentially ...

University of Warwick astronomers have uncovered the chemical fingerprint of a frozen, water-rich planetary fragment being consumed by a white dwarf star outside our solar system. In our solar system, ...

The Hubble Space Telescope has captured a collision near the star Fomalhaut. Credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center Paul ...

A gentle bump goes a long way in the Kuiper Belt. When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here’s how it works. A new study from researchers at the Southwest ...

The relative roles of protoplanetary differentiation versus late accretion in establishing Earth’s life-essential volatile element inventory are being hotly debated. To address this issue, we employ ...

With simulations that go into finer details than ever before, Brooke Polak of the University of Heidelberg and Hubert Klahr at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy (MPIA) have modeled a key phase in ...

system. Detailed structure of such inner region has been revealed for the first time thanks to the mid-infrared high-resolution observations. The results here have a large impact on the study of ...

Accumulation of dust and ice particles into planetesimals is an important step in the planet formation process. Planetesimals are the seeds of both terrestrial planets and the solid cores of gas and ...

The term “planetesimal” refers to small bodies that orbited the Sun prior to the planets’ formation. In 2006, the International Astronomical Union (IAU) ruled that a “dwarf planet” is a nearly ...