Do planets form in place, or migrate?
How planets form is still a remarkably open question. We haven’t even figured out definitively whether planets formed in the places they are now, or formed in different places and then migrated to their present locations.
I’ve got pretty bad eyesight. If I take off my glasses and look at the flowers on my window sill, they look like a fuzzy yellow blob. But with glasses, the petals and the patterns cast on them come into focus. This is how I felt when looking at the new observations of the debris disk around AU Mic. Putting on our ALMA glasses, the fuzzy debris disk around AU Mic is sharpening into something surprisingly consistent with our own Solar System.
New Observations suggest that we may have just witnessed the relativistic jet associated with the tidal disruption event Sw 1644+57 (first observed in March of 2011) turn off.
When it comes to planning and building new telescopes, the site selection is an important consideration. This paper evaluates eleven sites around the world, including current and proposed sites of sub-mm observatories, airborne SOFIA locations, and northern-hemisphere sites that could be of interest for future observatories.
Can we infer the presence of multiple planets by monitoring how a star’s brightness changes outside of planetary transit?
In this article, the authors study the effects of an optically thick disk around a forming massive protostar and examine how treating the gas opacity in the innermost dust-free region correctly affects the overall formation of massive stars.