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Birth of a Solar System

Gas-rich “proto-planetary” disks surround young, still forming stars, feeding them through accretion of dust and gas. These are the birthplaces of planetary systems. This image shows a simulation of a possible gas disk progenitor for the real exoplanetary system HR8799. Today, HR8799 has four, six-Jupiter-mass planets, 30 million years into their lives, surrounded by a

Binary System Mass Transfer

Binary systems are star systems comprising two stars orbiting around their common center of mass in a Keplerian orbit, which means that the two components are bound together by their mutual gravitational attraction. In this image, the binary system consists of a main sequence star like our sun, and a neutron star 1.4 times more