Seeing the birth of a solar system
This has to be one of the most impressive astronomy photos I’ve seen in a while. It’s an image of a disc of material orbiting the star HL Tau, 450 light years away. You can clearly see gaps in the disc where planets are forming as they sweep up all the material while orbiting the star. It’s like looking back into the past and seeing what our solar system might have looked like when it was very young.
A protoplanetary disc around HL Tau
Astronomers capture best image ever of planet formation
Astronomers have captured the best image ever of planet formation around an infant star, using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array’s (ALMA) new high-resolution capabilities. The image reveals in astonishing detail the planet-forming disk surrounding HL Tau, a Sun-like star located approximately 450 light-years from Earth in the constellation Taurus. The astronomers say ALMA uncovered never-before-seen […]
Trillions of wandering stars?
It’s hard to believe that up until Hubble’s observations in 1923, it was generally believed that the Milky Way galaxy was the entire Universe. And, until 1992 there no evidence that there were any other planets in the Universe besides our collection of 9 (at the time). Recently it was estimated that there could be twice as many free floating planets as stars in our galaxy alone. Now, there’s an estimate that up to half of the starts in the universe could actually be adrift in the space between galaxies.
Lost in Space: Half of All Stars Are Rogues Between Galaxies
As many as half of all stars in the universe lie in the vast gulfs of space between galaxies, an unexpected discovery made in a new study using NASA rockets. These stars could help solve mysteries regarding missing light and particles.