Content tagged "planet formation".
6 items (6 articles, 0 stories)
Around PDS 70, some 400 light-years away, a gas-giant planet several times Jupiter's mass is still gathering material inside a gap it carved in the star's disk. Its surface runs about 1,000°C, and it orbits roughly as far out as Uranus does from the Sun. This isn't a 'candidate' — it's the first time anyone has caught a planet mid-construction in a single clear image.
SORABUMI explains: 190 light-years away, in the TOI-1130 system, a Neptune-sized planet survives on a 4-day orbit even closer to the star than a hot Jupiter that should have cleared everything out. JWST read the atmosphere and found a story of two worlds that migrated inward together.
A red dwarf barely 40% the mass of our Sun is orbited by a gas giant nearly the size of Jupiter. TOI-5205b shouldn't exist according to planet formation theory — and when JWST peered at its atmosphere, the surprises kept coming.
In June 2026, the SPHERE instrument at ESO's VLT captured four years of observations that reveal, for the first time, a protoplanetary disk actually rotating. The AB Aurigae system is messier than theory predicted — and that's exciting.
Red dwarfs — small, dim, and utterly unremarkable — have been quietly swallowing their own planets. A May 2026 discovery used lithium as the smoking gun. The same thing may have happened in our own solar system.
How did Earth, Mars, and Jupiter come to exist? Starting from clouds of gas and dust, this explainer walks through the step-by-step process of planet formation — and what the explosion of exoplanet discoveries has taught us about just how many ways a planetary system can turn out.