The universe rarely makes things easy to understand. For decades, researchers thought they had the recipe for a solar system figured out. You put a star in the middle, scatter some rocky crumbs nearby ...

Astronomers have discovered an extrasolar planet with the largest core of any known planet. The discovery is especially exciting to planet formation theorists, because it provides extremely strong ...

One way gas giants form is through core accretion, where solid cores gradually grow in a disk by pulling in rocky and icy pebbles until they become massive enough to attract the gas that surrounds ...

The Saturn System has been studied in detail by the Cassini-Huygens Mission. A major thrust of those investigations has been to understand how Saturn formed and evolved and to place Saturn in the ...

Rocky planets such as Earth and Mars are born when small particles smash together to form larger, planet-sized clusters in a planet-forming disk, but researchers are less sure about how gas-giant ...

One way gas giants form is through core accretion, where solid cores gradually grow in a disk by pulling in rocky and icy pebbles until they become massive enough to attract the gas that surrounds ...

When a piece of science emerges that subtly renders the textbooks from the previous ten years seem lacking, you get a certain ...