Finding circumstellar disks in the Wide-Field Infrared Survey Explorer data is a tough job, but fortunately our brains are even better suited to the task than computers! You can help by lending your pattern-recognition skills to Disk Detective, the Zooniverse’s newest citizen science project.
How do so many hot jupiters come to orbit backwards?
Planetary radius is found to depend strongly on planet composition. The observed planet radius distribution can be recast as a composition distribution, with implications for the way planets form.
Astronomers have found evidence of water in the remains of a planetary system around a white dwarf. This indicates water-rich asteroids can bring water to terrestrial planets, important for the habitability of planets.
Dust traps may be the key to forming Kepler-16b and other circumbinary planets.
By sending a chamber of dust on a suborbital ballistic rocket, the authors of this paper hope to find out how planetesimals form.