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Astronomers have a problem on their hands: How can you make planets if you don't have enough of the building blocks? A new study finds that protoplanetary disks—the envelopes of dust and gas around young stars that give rise to planets—seem to contain orders of magnitude too little material to produce the planets.
"This work is telling us that we really have to rethink our planetary formation theories," says astronomer Gijs Mulders of the University of Chicago in Illinois, who was not involved in the research.
Stars are born from colossal clouds of gas and dust and, in their earliest stages, are surrounded by a thin disk of material. Dust grains within this halo collide, sometimes sticking together. The clumps build up into planetary cores, which are big enough to gravitationally attract additional dust and gas, eventually forming planets.
But many details about this process remain unknown, such as just how quickly planets arise from the disk, and how efficient they are in capturing material. The disks, surrounded by an obscuring haze of gas and dust, are difficult to observe. But radio telescopes can penetrate the haze and investigate young stars. The brightness of radio waves emitted by dust in the disk can be used to give a reasonable estimate of its overall mass.
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(Score: 2) by inertnet on Tuesday October 02 2018, @11:15AM (1 child)
For decades we've been told that galaxies appear to have less mass than observations require, so dark matter was introduced to account for the missing mass. Now there seems to be missing mass again in planet formation. It seems to me that astronomers can see less than they think they can.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 04 2018, @02:04PM
Trouble with this is that different galaxies are missing different masses (this is why universal theories don't hold up, while dark matter still can).