The prevailing model for planetary accretion assumes that the solar system's planets formed in an extremely hot, two-dimensional disk of gas and dust, post-dating the sun. Scientists now propose a ...

A research team led by Prof. Jiao Chengliang at the Yunnan Observatories of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, along with collaborators, has introduced a self-consistent model that addresses ...

(PhysOrg.com) -- The prevailing model for planetary accretion, also called fractal assembly, and dating back as far as the 18th century, assumes that the Solar System’s planets grew as small grains ...

Gas-giant planets such as Jupiter and Saturn form quickly by scooping up pebble-size building blocks and pushing smaller potential planets out of the way, new research suggests. Stars are born from ...

The two competing theories of star formation differ in how much gas they predict the cores of new stars suck in from the clump of gas in which they're embedded. Astrophysicists from UC Berkeley and ...

Image and inset of region surrounding Sagittarius A*. Image: NASA/UMass/D.Wang et al. Inset: NASA/STScI. At the center of the Milky Way lies a supermassive black hole named Sagittarius A*. Around this ...

The Saturn System has been studied in detail by the Cassini-Huygens Mission. A major thrust of those investigations has been to understand how Saturn formed and evolved and to place Saturn in the ...