While the composition of gas and dust in a molecular cloud is fairly uniform, everything changes once a star begins to form.

rock and dust. Uranus and Neptune come next. Whilst unmanned spacecraft have approached the gas planets, actual landings are not possible because of the lack of solid surfaces. The gas planets are ...

Opinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own. I cover aerospace, astronomy & hosted The Cosmic Controversy Podcast. This artist’s concept shows what the exoplanet WASP-107 b could ...

It was also common at this time for the planets to be visited by celestial objects from outside the system, not unlike the big space rock Oumuamua ... of the orbits of gas giant planets like ...

It grew larger thanks to countless collisions between dust particles, asteroids, and other growing planets, including one last giant impact that threw enough rock, gas, and dust into space to form the ...

Every time a planet has been found orbiting its star that closely before, it has either been a huge gas giant, similar to Jupiter, or a barren tiny rock planet smaller than Earth. "We expect ...

Planets are formed when dust and rock in a disk around a young star collide ... It all begins in a disk-shaped cloud of gas (99%) and dust (1%)—the protoplanetary disk. Here, dust particles ...