Topic
The scientific study of how planets form from protoplanetary disks via accretion, collisions, and migration, shaping their final orbits and compositions.
WASP-189b, nearly 320 light-years away, has a magnesium-to-silicon ratio that closely matches its host star's, astronomers report. Teams that predict rocky-planet makeup from stellar chemistry now have a check, made on a giant planet.
Reality
Kate Su's team combined Webb and Spitzer spectra to sort 21 extreme debris disks around young stars into silica-rich and silica-poor groups. NASA says the minerals encode how violent each dust-making collision was, a possible check on Moon-formation ideas.
Reality
Elias 2-24 b sits in a disk gap 55 times Earth's distance from its star, where formation models ask for at least five million years to build a Jupiter. Keck coronagraph images from 2018 and 2020 put it under a million years old.
Perspective Coverage
5 publishersReality
Kate Su's team used Webb and Spitzer spectra of 21 extreme debris disks to infer that about a third come from vaporizing impacts between Mars-sized bodies. Silica marks those violent cases, and it turns up only around stars younger than 300 million years.
Reality
University of Geneva astronomers and colleagues report that GJ 3090 b circles its red dwarf backward, 136 degrees out of line with the star's spin. Finding no companion able to flip it, the team suggests the planet formed in a second, tilted disk.
Reality
University of Copenhagen researchers estimate at least 75% of Earth's mass came via pebble accretion and about three-quarters of Mars' from planetesimals. On this evidence, rocky neighbours can grow by different routes, though the models have to assume what the building blocks were made of.
Reality
Astronomers led by the University of Arizona's Naman Bajaj used archival JWST data on 72 young Sun-like stars to show disk-stripping winds change with age. The survey identifies which force removes planet-building gas at each stage, but it does not yet put the giant-planet deadline in years.
Reality
University of Maryland astronomers using Webb found ammonia on HATS-6 b and early temperatures near 120 C, against the 425 C usually cited. Their leading suspect is reflective cloud, and the planet's chemistry readings depend on that temperature.
Reality
MPIA astronomers used ALMA to image WISPIT 2b, a gas giant five times Jupiter's mass, interacting with the gas it formed in. Formation models have rested on simulations and indirect evidence, so a planet still feeding on its birth gas gives them a direct check.
Reality
Planets inherit their direction of travel from the disk that formed them. A planet running backward around a small cool star is therefore a formation problem, and one team's answer is a second disk, tilted from the first.
Reality
Paolo Sossi and Dan Bower ran published meteorite data through ten isotope systems instead of the usual two, and found Earth's composition matches inner Solar System material alone, with under 2 percent from beyond Jupiter.
Reality
In MNRAS, Ege University's Mutlu Yildiz reports solar models that swallow a planet of five to 10 Earth masses matching interior structure and low surface lithium in the same run, a fit that needs an independent detection before it means much.
Reality