With simulations that go into finer details than ever before, Brooke Polak of the University of Heidelberg and Hubert Klahr at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy (MPIA) have modeled a key phase in ...

Accumulation of dust and ice particles into planetesimals is an important step in the planet formation process. Planetesimals are the seeds of both terrestrial planets and the solid cores of gas and ...

Using pore-scale simulations of melt networks, researchers report that melt drainage through percolation continues even as the melt fraction drops below the threshold needed to initiate percolation, ...

Data from NASA’s New Horizons mission are providing new insights into how planets and planetesimals — the building blocks of the planets — were formed. The New Horizons spacecraft flew past the ...

Most binary Kuiper belt objects orbit each other in the same direction as their orbit around the Sun. New computer simulations show that such orbits may be a fingerprint of planetesimal formation from ...

NASA's Kepler Space Telescope helped astronomers discover more about the formation of the planets in binary star systems. The researchers said that they now have an explanation of how the exoplanets ...

Data from NASA's New Horizons mission are providing new insights into how planets and planetesimals -- the building blocks of the planets -- were formed. Data from NASA's New Horizons mission are ...