Saturday 7 June 2008

Planetary Potential from Protoplanetary Disks


How planets form is one of the major questions in astronomy. Only recently have we been able to study the disks of dust and gas surrounding other stars in an effort to understand the process of how planets coalesce and form from these "protoplanetary" materials. But this is a difficult task at best, given the observational distances. "This is a vast topic with many challenges," said David Wilner from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astronomy at his talk at the American Astronomical Society meeting this week. "But over the course of the past few decades with observations of nearby star systems, we've come to a basic outline of the process of solar system formation." (read more)

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