The Earth grew by the collisional accretion of tens of Moon- to Mars-sized planetary embryos, themselves formed from the collisions of many smaller rocky bodies. The interiors of these planetary ...

Astronomers have found evidence of a process that supports an alternative, more rapid approach to planetary formation, more top down than bottom up. By Katrina Miller When it comes to making a planet, ...

A strange newfound planet as massive as Saturn appears to have the largest solid core known, providing an important clue to how some giant planets might form and setting off a controversy over how it ...

Ganymede is not only Jupiter's largest moon, but also the largest in our solar system and one of the few that hosts a massive ...

Stars with less than half the mass of our sun are able to host giant Jupiter-style planets, in conflict with the most widely accepted theory of how such planets form, according to a new study led by ...

Score one for the core accretion theory. When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here’s how it works. A massive, cold clump of material in the heart of the ...

NASA researchers recently discovered the largest solid core ever found in an extrasolar planet, and their discovery confirms a planet formation theory. “For theorists, the discovery of a planet with ...

On one side of the ring stands Doug “Rocky Core” Lin. On the other side stands Alan “Jupiter in a Hurry” Boss. For more than a decade, Lin, a theorist at the University of California, Santa Cruz, has ...

Scientists have discovered that Earth's core formed under more oxidizing conditions than previously proposed. While scientists know that Earth accreted from some mixture of meteoritic material, there ...

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 ...