Berkeley – Astrophysicists at the University of California, Berkeley, and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) have exploded one of two competing theories about how stars form inside immense ...

Have you ever wondered how gas giant planets like Jupiter or Saturn were formed? In a study published in Nature, astronomers took a detailed look at the formation of a gas giant in a star system 505 ...

The researchers traced gas inflow from ~2,500 astronomical units (AU) to ~40 AU from the protostar. (One AU is the average distance between Earth and the sun.) Their findings, published on September ...

Gravity causes matter to clump together, forming everything from stars to planets. Accretion disks form when material swirls around a central object due to conserved angular momentum. Magnetic fields ...

Astronomers have observed with unprecedented precision a massive star in the midst of cosmic feasting. This discovery offers a unique window into the growth mechanisms of these giants. Located about 2 ...

A close encounter more than 10,000 years ago stirred up spirals in the accretion disk surrounding the black hole at the center of our galaxy. Dr. LU Xing, an associate researcher from the Shanghai ...

Starting from the upper left and moving clockwise from large to small scales: upper left —"spiral-like" system; upper right — "bar-like" structure; lower right — rotating infalling envelope; lower ...