A groundbreaking collaboration between Michigan State University, Arizona State University, and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory is unlocking the secrets of planetary formation. Using the James ...

What happens in a protoplanetary disk to create planetesimals around a star? We know the general story -- the material begins to clump together and eventually grows from dust grains to rocky bodies capable of sticking together to make planets. But, how does that dust begin the aggregation journey? That's what a research team from the Switzerland wanted to know. So, they did experiments aboard parabolic micro-gravity flights to find an answer.

Results are coming out from the samples returned by China’s Chang’e-6 sample return mission to the far side of the Moon. They offer our first close-up look at the geology and history of the far side, and a recent paper published in Science Advances from researchers at the Chinese Academy of Sciences has very interesting insights about the impact history of the Moon itself, and even some for the solar system at large.

Earth has a group of cosmic stalkers. Known as “co-orbitals”, these small bits of rock have a 1:1 mean motion resonance with Earth. Basically, they take the exact same amount of time to orbit the Sun as we do. Astronomers have long believed these objects wandered in from the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, but recent spectral analysis suggests they better match the space-weathered lunar silicates that make up the Moon’s surface. As such, there has been an ongoing debate about whether these cosmic stalkers are actually visitors from the belt or blasted pieces of the Moon. A new study, published in Icarus, from researchers Elisa Alessi and Robert Jedicke provides strong hints that the belt is the more likely source - but pretty soon we’ll get a definitive answer from a spacecraft.

For most of us, dust is just something we have to clean up. For astronomers, interstellar dust is a hindrance when they want to study distant objects. However, recent James Webb Space Telescope (JWST)...

New study reveals Pluto and Charon’s origin: a unique "kiss and capture" collision redefines how binary systems form.

Astronomers have discovered that the interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS, only the third confirmed object from outside our solar system, contains an unusually high concentration of heavy water, or deuterium-rich water. This form of water is far more abundant in 3I/ATLAS than in any comet or planetary body in our solar system, with a deuterium ratio about 30 times higher than comets from our solar system and roughly 40 times higher than Earth's oceans. These findings, led by researchers at the University of Michigan and published in Nature Astronomy, suggest that 3I/ATLAS formed in an extremely cold and low-radiation environment, unlike the conditions that shaped our solar system. By studying the comet's water composition using telescopes like the MDM Observatory in Arizona and the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) in Chile, scientists were able to perform the first detailed chemical analysis of an interstellar object. The research highlights the diversity of planetary formation processes across the galaxy and indicates that more interstellar objects could soon be chemically analyzed, deepening our understanding of how planetary systems form in different regions of space. The study underscores the importance of preserving dark night skies for detecting faint celestial visitors like 3I/ATLAS.