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 ...

The biggest planets in the Solar System may have gotten their start from the smallest of rocks: centimetre-sized pebbles that formed 4.5 billion years ago from dust and ice swirling around the newborn ...

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 colliding ...

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 ...

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 ...

Berkeley – Astrophysicists at the University of California, Berkeley, and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) have exploded one of two competing theories about how stars form inside immense ...

BOULDER, Colo., Aug. 19 (UPI) --The solar system's biggest planets, gas giants, got their start as balls of pebbles. According to a new study in the journal Nature, Jupiter and Saturn began their ...

Scientists have long puzzled over how our solar system’s planets formed, because this isn’t a process they can watch unfold. Researchers have generally thought that Jupiter and Saturn grew out of ...