How and where did the first organic molecules emerge? Sophisticated chemistry models for the synthesis of amino acids within planetesimals can help us to decipher these mysteries.
Why do some planets slightly more massive than Earth have gas envelopes, while others don’t?
Amino acids were possibly brought to Earth by meteorite impacts, which contaminated the young environment with organic compounds. However, where and how did these most basic ingredients of life form in the first place?
Often science is a competition. Being first is sometimes important to get the well deserved credit for your work. Circumplanetary disks are currently a topic, in which you can still be first, since none has been detected so far. But is the current generation of telescopes already good enough to do that?
The authors of today’s paper show that the locations of the protoplanetary gaps in HL Tau are to be expected from the condensation points of common ices in the disk.
Planets seem to occur all over the place in the universe. However, it is still unknown how they form. The growth of objects larger than meter size is difficult because objects of this size quickly fall into the central star. This Astrobite gives a small overview of the meter-size barrier as found by Stuart J. Weidenschilling in 1977.