Topic

Planet formation

11 stories from Planck Standard. Latest: September 19, 2026.

Science
The Solar System's First Solid Bodies Were 83% to 92% Fire-Forged Rock Beads and Almost No Ice, Yale Chemists Found by Reading Sulfur and Iron in Meteorites That Melted So Completely They Erased Their Own Ingredients

Two independent tracers in outer-solar-system iron meteorites both point to matrix levels of 8% to 17%, lower than in any known chondrite. 'Both tracers independently tell the same story,' said lead author Damanveer Grewal. The result pushes the aerodynamic sorting that built the planets back to the very beginning.

Sep 19 4 min read
Science
Astronomers Confirmed a Jupiter-Mass Planet Less Than a Million Years Old, Sitting 55 Times Farther From Its Star Than Earth Is From the Sun

Elias 2-24 b beat the previous record for the youngest known planet by more than 4 million years. It was found in decade-old Keck archive images, in exactly the gap in the star's disk that ALMA spotted a decade ago.

Sep 16 4 min read
Science
Mercury's First Crust Was Graphite. It Floated Up Out of the Magma, 40 to 120 Meters of It

Lab experiments at up to 2,170C show carbon behaves backwards on Mercury: it stays out of the core and rises to the surface. That also rewrites what the core is made of.

Sep 4 3 min read
Science
A 5-Million-Year-Old Star Is Swallowing Comets. Astronomers Caught It by Watching Sodium Flicker

Sodium gas appeared and vanished over successive nights around PDS 70, a young sunlike star 370 light-years away. The likely explanation is icy bodies falling inward past two newborn gas giants.

Sep 2 3 min read
Physics
Giant Planets Spin Faster Than Heavier Brown Dwarfs, Keck Survey Finds, Rewriting Formation Clues

A large survey of alien-world rotation rates shows mass alone does not set how fast a world spins, pointing to magnetic fields and formation as the deciding factors.

Jun 14 3 min read
Physics
Astronomers Capture the First 'Live' View of a Planetary Nursery Spinning Around a Distant Star

Using the European VLT's SPHERE instrument over four years, a French-led team directly tracked the rotation of the planet-forming disk around the young star AB Aurigae — and spotted anomalies that hint at giant planets being born.

Jun 7 3 min read
Science
Astronomers Find a 'Planet Factory' Just Beyond Jupiter That Churned Out Worlds for Two Million Years

A dust trap in the infant solar system acted as a breeding ground, producing generation after generation of planetary building blocks, a new study finds.

Jun 5 3 min read
Science
Hubble Reveals 'Dracula's Chivito,' the Largest Chaotic Planet Nursery Ever Observed

The 400-billion-mile planet-forming disk around the young star IRAS 23077+6707, 1,000 light-years from Earth, is roughly 40 times wider than our solar system and unexpectedly turbulent.

May 14 3 min read
Science
James Webb Telescope Finds 'Forbidden' Planet With Atmosphere That Defies Planet Formation Theory

TOI-5205 b — a Jupiter-sized world orbiting a tiny red dwarf — has an atmosphere poorer in heavy elements than even its own star, with its bulk interior locking away 100 times more metals than reach the observable atmosphere.

Apr 7 4 min read
Science
Astronomers Spot Two Baby Planets Forming Around Young Star WISPIT 2 in Rare Direct Imaging

Using the Very Large Telescope's upgraded GRAVITY+ instrument, scientists have directly confirmed a second protoplanet in what researchers call 'the best look into our own past.'

Mar 27 4 min read
Science
Astronomers Confirm Two Protoplanets Forming at the Same Time in Rare 'Twin Birth' Discovery

The star system WISPIT 2, just 5 million years old, becomes only the second known system where multiple planets have been directly observed forming simultaneously — offering an unprecedented planetary science laboratory.

Mar 27 4 min read