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16 stories from Planck Standard. Latest: November 2, 2026.
A first-ever joint survey of 27 faint icy objects found the smallest ones share colors with larger relatives, and Webb found fewer tiny bodies than planet-formation models predict.
University of New Mexico experiments turned nearly 80% of the iron oxide in rock samples into iron and water vapor, suggesting hundreds of oceans' worth could form this way.
University of Arizona astronomers say the 1,000-AU dust streamer around Beta Pictoris is carbon-rich and fluffy, likely debris from a collision between Pluto-sized bodies.
About one-third of the disks carry silica-rich debris from Mars-sized collisions, while the rest point to smaller grazing impacts, a Webb-led team reports in The Astrophysical Journal.
Radio images of WISPIT 2b, a planet five times Jupiter's mass still pulling in gas 430 light-years away, show swirls that simulations predicted for decades but no one had seen next to a known planet.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.'
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.