How do terrestrial planets like Earth form and evolve to enable life to exist? This is what a recent study published in Nature hopes to address as a pair of scientists from the Southwest Research ...

How, from the incandescent gas surrounding a young star, do the first solid materials at the origin of planets emerge? This transition, from gas to solid, called "condensation," constitutes one ...

A new SwRI-led paper highlights the scientific progress made in understanding the evolution of terrestrial planets, including the effects of late large impacts on pre-existing modes of tectonics. For ...

For decades, scientists have studied how planets form by looking at young stars nearby, assuming that these environments could be representative of all star systems. However, as astronomers discover ...