Scientists glean planet formation secrets by studying a young and chaotic star system

Scientists have used the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) to study a very young star system called Elias 2-27. The team has shed light on some mysteries of planet formation by confirming that gravitational instabilities play a key role in planet formation. For the first time, researchers directly measured the mass of a protoplanetary disk using gas velocity data. Protoplanetary …