Tag Archives: Disk

The first-ever detection of heavy water in a planet-forming disk around a young star offers evidence that the water predates the star itself — and it appears this substance even originated in the cold, dark molecular cloud that gave birth to the star. Scientists spotted the heavy water (which we’ll get into in just a moment) in the planet-forming disk …

The origin of water on Earth is a complex affair. Was it trapped in the rocks that formed our planet or was it brought by comets and asteroids afterwards? We do not know for sure, but we can move the question even further. Did the water form with the Sun and the planet, or is it even older than that? …

A swirl of gas and dust orbits a young star named HD 135344B, 440 light-years away in the constellation Scorpius. Inside that haze, astronomers have spotted telltale spirals that most theories link to the tug of a growing world. Now, fresh images from the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) point to a compact object exactly where one of …

Tiger Woods has gone through a seventh back surgery, this time to replace a disk in his lower back and had caused pain and mobility issues. Woods said in a social media post he had the surgery in New York and said it was the right decision for his his health and his troubled back. He did not mention how …

Tiger Woods has gone through a seventh back surgery, this time to replace a disk in his lower back and had caused pain and mobility issues. Woods said in a social media post he had the surgery in New York and said it was the right decision for his his health and his troubled back. He did not mention how …

Many of the most interesting bodies in our Solar System aren’t planets, but the moons that orbit them. They have active volcanoes, hydrocarbon oceans, geysers, and moon-wide oceans buried under icy crusts. And, as far as we can tell, the physics of the processes that produce large planets should make moon formation inevitable. Given how common planets are, our galaxy …

NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has provided the first direct measurements of the chemical and physical properties of a potential moon-forming disk encircling a large exoplanet. The carbon-rich disk surrounding the world called CT Cha b, which is located 625 light-years away from Earth, is a possible construction yard for moons, although no moons are detected in the Webb data. …

Fomalhaut is one of the brightest stars in the night sky and is about 25 light-years away, making it a galaxy amenable to detailed observations. It’s also a young star, only about 440 million years old. At that age, stars like Fomalhaut are surrounded by active debris disks made of rock and dust from collisions between planetesimals. Exoplanets form in …

A bizarre planet-forming disk is full of carbon dioxide in the regions where Earth-like planets could form, fresh observations from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) show. Usually, such planet-forming disks contain water, but “water is so scarce in this system that it’s barely detectable — a dramatic contrast to what we typically observe,” Jenny Frediani, a doctoral student in …

Using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), astronomers have discovered a strange disk of gas and dust around an infant star that could challenge current models of planet formation. The protoplanetary disk has an odd chemical composition. It features a surprisingly high concentration of carbon dioxide in the region in which rocky planets like Earth are expected to form and …