Ripping Apart Asteroids to Account for Earth’s Strangeness
Earth’s composition seemingly does not fit into planet formation theory. Ripping apart its building blocks by collisions during accretion might sound violent, but can be a way to go.
To boldly go where no star has gone before
More than 100 massive stars orbit the supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy incredibly closely.
Dry Out Super-Earths via Giant Impacts
A dry planet and one with a thick atmosphere close together seems to be very weird. How about smashing one with a huge impactor?
Triggered fragmentation in self-gravitating disks
How to form clumps in the intermediate ranges of massive protoplanetary disks? Could these later be planets?
Chondrules are old and everywhere – are solar system’s solid bodies built by them?
A model that needs fewest parameters to explain a scenario is favourable. The fact that mm-size dust grains (chondrules) are present in the entire solar system brings rise to the question, whether all bigger solid objects are a collection of chondrules.
Missing Spirals and Forming Planets
Last year, an image was released that took our breath away. Exquisite rings carved in a disk of material around a nearby star. Now, astronomers want to know if forming planets are responsible, and why the image might look different from the cartoon in your textbook.