Dust from meteorites that crash-landed on Earth have revealed that Earth's precursor, known as proto-Earth, formed much faster than previously thought, a new study finds.
Put another way, if the entire 4.6 billion years of the solar system's existence were compressed into a 24-hour period, proto-Earth formed in just 1 minute and 30 seconds, the researchers said.
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In contrast, the new idea holds that planets formed through the accretion of cosmic dust, a process in which dust attracts more and more particles through gravity. "We start from dust, essentially," study lead researcher Martin Schiller said in a statement . Schiller is an associate professor of geochemistry at the Centre for Star and Planet Formation (StarPlan) at the University of Copenhagen's Globe Institute, in Denmark.
This may worth something:
Two Mars Missions Are Gutted Despite Near-Record Funding for Planetary Science | The Planetary
Strong funding for NASA's Planetary Science Division isn't enough to support MSL Curiosity and Mars Odyssey, apparently
The President's Budget Request (PBR) for NASA's next fiscal year was released on 10 February. And while the $3 billion increase for the lunar return effort garnered headlines, the PBR touches every program within NASA's expansive portfolio, including planetary science, an area of particular interest to The Planetary Society.
Overall, NASA's Planetary Science Division fares well in the FY 2021 budget request, with a few significant caveats. The promised start of a planetary defense mission to find and characterize hazardous near-Earth objects failed to materialize in the proposal.
See planets Venus and Uranus get close at dusk on 8 March – Astronomy Now
The brightest and faintest planets visible to the naked eye* appear closest in the sky at 15:36 UT on Sunday, 8 March . At this time, magnitude -4.3 Venus lies 2.2 degrees north of magnitude +5.9 Uranus against the constellation backdrop of Aries. For observers in the heart of the British Isles, the sky is dark enough to view the pair in binoculars about 25° high in the west around the onset of nautical dusk, which is about 7:30pm GMT.
If you are successful in viewing Venus and Uranus in the same binocular field of view on the evening of 8 March, consider their magnitude difference of 10.2 times, which equates to a difference in brightness (neglecting their varied apparent sizes and phases) exceeding 12,000 times!
Binary Stars Appear To Harbor Just As Many Planets As Single Stars, Says Study
This artist's impression shows the strange object AR Scorpii. In this unique double star a rapidly ... [+] spinning white dwarf star (right) powers electrons up to almost the speed of light. These high energy particles release blasts of radiation that lash the companion red dwarf star (left) and cause the entire system to pulse dramatically every 1.97 minutes with radiation ranging from the ultraviolet to radio.
This conundrum got a partial answer with the recent publication of a paper appearing in the journal MDPI Galaxies .
In case you are keeping track:
For The First Time, Astronomers Have Detected an Exoplanet Using Radio Waves
A boring, unremarkable star 26 light-years away has turned out to be not so boring after all. Astronomers have found that it has a planet - not just any planet, but one with a mass only about five times Earth's mass - using a wild new method inspired by Jupiter's auroras.
It's a method that could help us find way more of the hard-to-find rocky exoplanets like Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars.
"We adapted the knowledge from decades of radio observations of Jupiter to the case of this star," said astronomer Joe Callingham of the Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy (ASTRON).
Massive planet that would dwarf Jupiter has been discovered in our galactic neighborhood
Just 330 light-years from Earth, a massive baby planet named 2MASS 1155–7919 b has recently been born from a cloud of gas and dust. Researchers from the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) found this rare young gas giant, 10 times larger than Jupiter, orbiting far from its stellar companion— 600 times further from its parent star than the Earth is from the Sun.
The star around which this planet orbits is also extremely young, having formed just five million years ago, roughly one-thousandth the age of the Sun.
Meet the 17-year-old who discovered an alien planet: A Q&A with high school student Wolf
17-year-old high school student Wolf Cukier made a major discovery on the third day of his NASA internship, when he noticed the telltale signs of a distant planet orbiting two stars.
Cukier was viewing data from exoplanet TOI 1338 b , a Saturn-size gas planet that travels in a circumbinary orbit, or around two stars, 1,300 light-years away from our sun, in the constellation Pictor. Cukier spotted the planet using data from NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), which is tasked with detecting distant planets by spotting when the light from their stellar parents dim as the exoplanets travel in front of the stars, as seen from our perspective.
A Good Week for Planet Formation - Scientific American Blog Network
It can come as a surprise just how uncertain we still are about the mechanisms and timelines for planetary origins. After all, with exploration of our own solar system and the discovery of thousands of worlds around distant suns we’ve assembled a remarkable overview of the workings of planetary systems and the possibilities for their origins.
At the same time, the generally accepted picture of how interstellar material is accumulated and processed to form new stars and new worlds is still built on hypotheses set up by the likes of Emanuel Swedenborg, Immanuel Kant (yes, that Kant), and Pierre-Simon Laplace in the 1700s.
Happening on Twitter
'Starter' Earth grew in a flash. Here's how the planet did it. https://t.co/eQQnwGnkYk https://t.co/3R0vHfWAjX SPACEdotcom (from NYC) Sat Feb 29 17:12:04 +0000 2020
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