University of Warwick astronomers have uncovered the chemical fingerprint of a frozen, water-rich planetary fragment being consumed by a white dwarf star outside our solar system.

Psyche appears to be an iron core, or part of one, produced during the history of collisions experienced by a fairly large asteroid with other large asteroids. The collision or collisions were likely ...

Accumulation of dust and ice particles into planetesimals is an important step in the planet formation process. Planetesimals are the seeds of both terrestrial planets and the solid cores of gas and ...

system. Detailed structure of such inner region has been revealed for the first time thanks to the mid-infrared high-resolution observations. The results here have a large impact on the study of ...

The universe is often portrayed as a vast stretch of emptiness, but in reality, it’s filled with unfathomable explosions, mind-bending gravitational anomalies, and an untold number of cataclysmic ...

Saturn's moon Phoebe might be a planetesimal—a remnant of the rocky building blocks of the planets in our Solar System. A new study by Julie C. Castillo-Rogez et al. from Cassini spacecraft data ...

The first scientific report from the flyby of the distant Kuiper belt object (KBO) Ultima Thule, shows two objects gently joined together in a cosmic kiss that is believed to be the process that ...

Figure 1: β Pic mid-infrared images. We used standard chop-nod techniques at the Gemini South telescope with a 15-arcsec chop throw orthogonal to the disk's major axis. The PSF at 8.7–18.3 µm was ...

Most meteorites that have landed on Earth are fragments of planetesimals, the very earliest protoplanetary bodies in the solar system. Scientists have thought that these primordial bodies either ...