February 2016
How to Build Planets
... dust traps (or vortices) that could play an important role in the formation of planetesimals and planets at large radii. Building planets The building blocks of planet formation start with tiny dust grains, that include components such as graphite...
August 2018
Exoplanet census promises radical discoveries
... tens or hundreds of millions of stars are monitored, the precise alignment demonstrated in Figure 2 occurs frequently. As the foreground planet-hosting star passes in front of the background star, it begins to bend the light from the background star...
August 2018
Measuring the pulse of Mars
...to live up to its name by investigating the red planet like no other mission has done before it. NASA’s InSight...are of immense scientific interest as they help scientists to scan the planet’s interior in a similar way that an x-ray reveals the insides...
November 2018
BepiColombo – a mission to explore Mercury
...Mercury is also a key laboratory for surface-bounded exospheres where, as the name implies, the boundary of a planet’s exosphere is the planet’s surface. In the case of Mercury, the density of its exosphere is too low for molecules to behave as a gas...
06 April 2020
Planets can form second atmospheres rich in CO, new study shows
... today. Furthermore, a late gas accretion scenario is a more favourable and efficient method for accreting volatiles on a terrestrial planet than if it was bombarded my comets and meteorites, say the team - a situation that many think was responsible...
25 January 2021
Unique six-exoplanet system challenges theories of how planets form
... greatly increase the stability of planetary configurations by preventing close encounters and collisions, identifying how and where planets like this form is a very important but as yet unanswered question in planetary science. As such, the TOI-178...
