About 3.8 billion years ago, large impactors were still pelting the Moon, creating huge craters that have survived to this day. Today’s paper explores whether asteroids from the asteroid belt could have been responsible for the majority of these impacts.
I received a giant planet for Christmas! Where did it come from? At what distance from its star did it form? I try to use the planet’s atmospheric composition to answer those questions, but Piso et al. point out this method may not be as straightforward as I would imagine.
Johnny Cash sang about “walking the line” as a metaphor for maintaining honesty and morality. Hopefully, he wasn’t talking about a snow line in a protoplanetary disk. Today’s featured study shows these snow lines may not follow such a narrow path.
In the last few years, astronomers have used ALMA to measure circumstellar disk masses for the first time, but found most of the mass to be missing. If these low disk masses are real, they would suggest planet formation is much faster than we think! But could it be that this missing mass is there and we just can’t see it?
J’onn J’onzz needs astronomers’ help figuring out why his home planet of Mars is smaller (and hence, less habitable) than the Earth. He already asked the rest of the Justice League, but they could not solve the problem. Can Drążkowska et al. save the day?