Image: A Hubble Space Telescope image of circumstellar disc surrounding a young star. Just as anthropologists sought “the missing link” between apes and humans, astronomers are embarking on a quest ...

The transition from cluster to stream offers an extraordinary opportunity for exoplanetary science. Inside a dense cluster, ...

How do terrestrial planets like Earth form and evolve to enable life to exist? This is what a recent study published in Nature hopes to address as a pair of scientists from the Southwest Research ...

Humanity may not be extraordinary but rather the natural evolutionary outcome for our planet and likely others, according to a new model for how intelligent life developed on Earth. The model, which ...

The black star represents the position of the star. The colored lines are the orbits of two planets. The yellow one is the outer, and it is highly inclined. The inner one is the red one. As time ...

Planets are bodies that orbit a star and have sufficient gravitational mass that they form themselves into roughly spherical shapes that, in turn, exert gravitational force on smaller objects around ...

A new experimental study published in Geochimica et Cosmochimica Acta reveals that Mercury’s sulfur-rich interior behaves in ways that challenge long-standing Earth-based models of planetary evolution ...

The radius gap between super-Earths and sub-Neptunes Mass measurements using transit timing variations (TTVs) N-body simulations to model orbital dynamics and stability Atmospheric loss via ...

When a star is young, it is often still surrounded by a primordial rotating disk of gas and dust, from which planets can form. Astronomers like to find such disks because they might be able to catch ...

A new study presents a compelling new model for the formation of super-Earths and mini-Neptunes -- planets that are 1 to 4 times the size of Earth and among the most common in our galaxy. Using ...

Unfortunately, this book can't be printed from the OpenBook. If you need to print pages from this book, we recommend downloading it as a PDF. Visit NAP.edu/10766 to get more information about this ...

New theory proposes that humans — and analogous life beyond Earth — may represent the probable outcome of biological and planetary evolution UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Humanity may not be extraordinary ...