formation

Water Arrived in the Final Stages of Earth’s Formation

by

Roughly 4.6 billion years ago, the Sun was born from the gas and dust of a nebula that underwent gravitational collapse. The remaining gas and dust settled into a protoplanetary disk that slowly accreted to form the planets, including Earth. About 4.5 billion years ago, our planet was impacted by a Mars-sized body (Theia), which … Read more

Webb Observes Protoplanetary Disks that Contradict Models of Planet Formation

by

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) was specifically intended to address some of the greatest unresolved questions in cosmology. These include all of the major questions scientists have been pondering since the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) took its deepest views of the Universe: the Hubble Tension, how the first stars and galaxies came together, how … Read more