Space dust as Earth's sun shield

On a cold winter day, the warmth of the sun is welcome. Yet as humanity emits more and more greenhouse gases, the Earth's atmosphere traps more and more of the sun's energy and steadily increases the Earth's temperature. ...

Even stars doomed to die as supernovae can have planets

Ninety percent of all exoplanets discovered to date (there are now more than 5,000 of them) orbit around stars the same size or smaller than our sun. Giant stars seem to lack planetary companions, and this fact has serious ...

The Earth formed much faster than previously thought

The precursor of our planet, the proto-Earth, formed within a time span of approximately five million years, shows a new study from the Centre for Star and Planet Formation (StarPlan) at the Globe Institute at the University ...

Image: Hera logo aboard ISS

The logo for Hera, ESA's proposed asteroid mission for planetary defense, has already reached space, thanks to ESA astronaut Luca Parmitano, who snapped this photo from the cupola of the International Space Station. The Hera ...

ALMA observes the formation sites of solar-system-like planets

Researchers have spotted the formation sites of planets around a young star resembling the sun. Two rings of dust around the star, at distances comparable to the asteroid belt and the orbit of Neptune in the solar system, ...

How comets are born

Detailed analysis of data collected by Rosetta show that comets are the ancient leftovers of early Solar System formation, and not younger fragments resulting from subsequent collisions between other, larger bodies.

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