Still from a simulation of a forming planetary disk. The images show the rotating inner disk along the top half, and the shadow it casts on the outer disk in the lower half. CREDIT Rebecca Nealon / ...

This photo shows the upper part of the water tornado model. The acrylic glas tank has a diameter of 50 centimetres and is illuminated with LED strips. The water forms a vortex whose surface shape ...

A team of astronomers, led by University of Warwick in collaboration with researchers at MIT and McMaster, have developed a novel method to use the properties of dust rings around stars to estimate ...

Roughly 5 billion years ago Earth was in the process of forming. Gas and dust gathered with the young sun's protoplanetary disk, likely nudged a bit by the resonant gravitational pull of Jupiter and ...

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 ...

Many protoplanetary disks in which new planets are formed are much smaller than thought. Using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) scientists of the Leiden Observatory (the ...