Astronomers generally agree that planets form out of the dusty debris disks that surround most newborn stars. When one of these so-called protoplanetary disks rotates around a nascent star, globs of ...

A new planet starts its life in a rotating circle of gas and dust, a cradle known as a protostellar disc. My colleagues and I have used computer simulations to show that newborn gas ...

Large planets like Jupiter that form far away from their host stars may start forming as flattened disks similar to a fluffy pancake rather than as spherical structures, according to a new study.