What can the protoplanetary disk’s lifetime teach us about finding life beyond Earth? This is what a recent study published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters hopes to address as an international ...

A whopping 20 new scientific papers use data gathered by a host of radio dishes perched high in the Chilean desert to tease apart the mysteries of how planets form. The Atacama Large ...

ALMA has spotted ring and spiral structures in protoplanetary disks just 300,000 or so years old. When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here’s how it works.

Researchers at UC Santa Barbara, The University of Texas at Austin, Yale University and National Taiwan Normal University have found that a fair number of sun-like stars emerge with their rotational ...

Astronomers have detected a giant exoplanet—between three and ten times the size of Jupiter—hiding in the swirling disk of gas and dust surrounding a young star. Earlier observations of this star, ...

Astronomers have mapped out the chemicals inside of planetary nurseries in extraordinary detail. The newly unveiled maps reveal the locations of dozens of molecules within five protoplanetary ...

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 ...