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 new analysis of the common accretion-disk model explaining how planets form in a debris disk around our Sun uncovered a possible reason for Earth's comparative dryness. The study found that our ...

Observations of the interacting binary star using telescopes at Kitt Peak National Observatory and NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope suggest that the disks of hot gas that accumulate around a wide ...

Spin transfer Artist’s impression of an accretion disc surrounding a black hole. (Courtesy: Shutterstock/oorka) Researchers in France have created a new experiment that could improve our understanding ...

Disks of hot gas drawn onto a central star or black hole are the best energy-producing machines in the Universe. So how do these accretion disks work? The answer, it seems, is blowing in their winds.

Lab top accretion disc: Cutaway diagram of the experimental setup used by Wang and colleagues. The data shown in the left portion of the gap between cylinders illustrates the simulated shear profile ...

Earth probably formed in a hotter, drier part of the solar system than previously thought, which could explain our planet's puzzling shortage of water, a new study reports. Our newly forming solar ...

The black hole’s spin axis is assumed to align vertically. The jet’s direction is almost perpendicular to the disk. The misalignment between the black hole spin axis and the disk rotation axis ...