protoplanetary disk chemistry

Three cabinets full of rocks. In one, metallic grains and the gray mineral enstatite; in the second, the same grains but with rusty streaks; in the third, layered clays swollen with water. All three sets were pulled from meteorites that fell to Earth: chondrites. They were born in the same gas-and-dust disk around the young Sun, yet somehow turned out so different.

Deep inside a sub-Neptune, where pressures reach a hundred thousand bars and temperatures hit four thousand degrees, rock behaves like boiling soup. Heavy vapors of silicon and magnesium rise, cool, and fall back as a rain of solid particles.

On the surface of the Moon and asteroids, you can find pits smaller than a pinhead but with shiny, melted rims. Such marks are left by tiny meteorites, but the exact impact speed at which melting occurs remained unclear.

The night sky seems unchanging, but galaxies constantly exchange matter. The Milky Way, like a great river, absorbs smaller streams — dwarf galaxies. Along with their stars, planets may also come to us.

In the cold depths of space float rocks older than Earth itself. Inside some of them hide tiny glassy spheres — chondrules. They formed when a disk of gas and dust still swirled around the young Sun. Carbonaceous meteorites Asuka 12236, Paris, and Maribo have preserved these spheres almost untouched.

In the coldest, darkest corners of space, dust grains get covered in ice, like a window on a frosty day. This ice isn't just frozen water: it also contains carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide. From such ice, comets and planets may eventually assemble. But until now, it was unclear how the dust grain itself affects the ice that forms on it.

Around young stars, flat clouds of gas and dust swirl: these are future planetary systems. Inside some of them, a void gapes: the dust and gas have been swept away, as if someone thinned out the middle of a vinyl record.

In dark interstellar clouds where new stars are born, chemistry starts with a tiny particle — the trihydrogen ion (H₃⁺). It collides with other atoms and sets off a cascade of reactions that build ever more complex molecules. For a long time, it was thought that the main reaction producing it, H₂⁺ colliding with H₂, only happens in the gas phase.

In the furnace of star formation, the heat reaches 900 degrees Celsius, like a glowing blast furnace. It is in this hellish heat that cosmic crystals are born. Astronomers have for the first time caught the moment when crystalline dust appears right during an accretion flare (when the star gobbles up surrounding gas) at the very young star EC 53, still cocooned in dense gas.

In the black depths of space, on the surfaces of tiny icy dust grains, a quiet construction is underway. There, where temperatures drop to near absolute zero and harsh radiation abounds, the ordinary amino acid glycine, the simplest protein building block, links up with itself.

Edge of the spotlight. Remove the dazzling light of the central star, and a theater of shadows emerges. The James Webb coronagraph, like a dense curtain, hid the star TW Hydrae — and on a stage 120 astronomical units long (four times the distance to Neptune), its protoplanetary disk came alive.

The star AB Aur is young, about 4 million years old. Around it swirls a dense disk of gas and dust. Recently, a long gas stream, a flow of material from the surrounding cloud, crashed into it.

A galactic disk is like a frozen ripple on water: every disturbance leaves a trace that can be read billions of years later. When a dwarf satellite galaxy flies past or a head-on merger occurs, stars in the disk start to oscillate, like bobbers rocked by a wave.

Among the scorching exoplanets that circle perilously close to their stars lies the secret of their birth. Nearly three decades ago, Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz discovered the first such world, and since then astronomers have been tormented by the question: how does a gas giant end up pressed against…

When the JWST telescope breaks the light of a distant exoplanet into a spectrum, it reads a chemical chronicle. But this chronicle is not a monolithic truth; it's an atmosphere constantly rewritten by the star's radiation.

Deep space, galactic center. A supermassive black hole is surrounded by a scorching disk of gas and dust. And then, through this fiery veil, a star shoots by every few hours — like an arrow loosed from the bow of gravity. Each passage triggers a dazzling X-ray flare that for a moment outshines the entire galactic nucleus.

WASP-121 b is not just a hot ball. It's a world where iron vaporizes and the sky glows with its own heat. A fresh look at it has revealed what 'ingredients' went into making it. The James Webb Space Telescope has for the first time clearly detected vaporized silicon monoxide in its atmosphere — a refractory substance usually locked inside dust grains.

A scorching rocky planet is like a pot of boiling soup, except its lid is the atmosphere. Gases escape from the magma, wrap the world in a thick blanket, and in turn influence how quickly the celestial body cools. For GJ 1132 b, which orbits so close to its star that a year lasts just one and a half Earth days, this connection is especially important.

Stars are born in cold clouds of cosmic dust and hydrogen. Inside these cocoons, protostars — the cores of future suns — were long thought to be just hot clumps. But it turns out many of them are powerful accelerators: they shoot out narrow jets of gas that, slamming into surrounding matter, produce invisible gamma-ray light.

The James Webb Space Telescope peered into a disk of gas and dust around a young star where planets are born, and for the first time spotted ice made of heavy water. This water is not ordinary: in its molecules, regular hydrogen is replaced by deuterium, its heavier sibling.

Putting together the Solar System is like crafting a high-end tasting menu: the recipe isn't always set in stone — sometimes the final ingredient is added while the dish is already cooking.

The birth of planets is a cosmic forge: gas and dust compress, shock waves and harsh radiation burn away all complexity. It was thought that fragile organic threads like cyanopolyynes couldn't survive this hell.

A kindergarten where some kids are busy making sandcastles while others are already assembling building blocks. That's roughly what the V1298 Tau system looks like: it's only 20 million years old — by cosmic standards, it just left the nursery. Several planets orbit it, and two of them, b and e, turned out to be surprisingly different.

Among the icy chunks hurtling through the void, there are special travelers — interstellar comets. They were born around distant stars and happened to wander into our neighborhood. One of them, 3I/ATLAS, came under the gaze of telescopes as it approached the Sun. Its material, frozen gases and refractory dust, began to evaporate, leaving a glowing tail behind.

Imagine a spinning top the size of a city, weighing more than the Sun and making hundreds of revolutions per second. That's a neutron star — the remnant of an exploded star. Occasionally, its rotation suddenly speeds up, as if something inside has switched. Astronomers call these jumps glitches and suspect that invisible vortices in the star's superfluid interior are to blame.

A streetlamp flickers as someone walks past. That's roughly how our nearest star, Proxima Centauri, behaves: it flares in response to the motion of its planets. Astronomers observed the star with a highly sensitive instrument, the ESPRESSO spectrograph. It captures light and splits it into colors, much like a prism.

A pot of boiling porridge, where instead of grains there are layers of oxygen and silicon, and the fire beneath is about to go out, and the star will collapse in on itself. Until now, astrophysicist cooks have used a simplified recipe: they assumed that bubbles and eddies in the porridge obey one and the same average temperature throughout the depth.

Chondrules look like frozen raindrops made of stone. They're about the size of a grain of sand, but they record the history of the first few million years of the Solar System. Once, these droplets floated in the scorching gas around the young Sun, then clumped into asteroids and fell to Earth as meteorites.

An old chest of family heirlooms opens, and inside lie jewels that were thought to be as old as great-grandmother. But suddenly it turns out: the gold was remelted, the stones were recut, and this happened much later than thought. A similar story happened to the oldest particles in meteorites — calcium-aluminum inclusions, or CAIs.

Around small, cool, but extremely restless red dwarfs, planets the size of Earth often orbit. Such a star is like a temperamental stove that intermittently erupts flares: powerful streams of light and particles batter the planet's atmosphere, as if someone splashed fire into a simmering soup pot.

A chemical reaction resembles passing through a turnstile: a crowd creates chaos and gets stuck, while an orderly line moves. In the quantum world, however, when the jostling subsides, the barrier can become ghostly — a particle passes through it as if the turnstile has vanished.

At the Large Hadron Collider, not only nuclei but also individual protons collide. Even in such small systems, collective behavior resembling the flow of a liquid is observed. But the proton is a quantum object; its state is described by a wave function, not by temperature and pressure.

Around young stars, flat clouds of gas and dust swirl, like pizza dough from which planets will eventually be shaped. This cloud contains various chemical elements, and sulfur is one of the most elusive: it's hard to catch with telescopes because it hides in solid grains or escapes as gas.

A star inherits the chemical makeup of its parent gas cloud, just like a child inherits genes from its parents. Astronomers turned this into a method: by measuring the fraction of carbon and other elements with spectroscopy (splitting light into colors), they construct family trees for the stars in a galaxy.

A baker adds more sugar to the dough, and the pie turns out different. So it is with a star: the composition of its "dough"—the cloud of gas and dust from which planets are born — determines what worlds will form around it.

Two very small, cool stars, similar to the famous TRAPPIST-1, reside in the young Upper Scorpius star cluster. They are only 5–10 million years old — by cosmic standards, mere infants. Each is surrounded by a disk of gas and dust from which planets may eventually assemble.

In the cold gas cloud where a star is born, chemistry sleeps. Molecules barely collide, reactions stall. But when a charged particle zips through the cloud, it knocks electrons off atoms — ionizing them. That's how active ions appear in a dormant cloud, ready to build new molecules.

Rocky planets orbit dim red stars. Some of them have a year shorter than an Earth day: these worlds are called ultra-short-period planets. Their surfaces are scorching, and their skies are forever bathed in crimson light.

In the cold outer reaches of the Solar System, water is considered the main building material for ices. But some comets and distant icy bodies have an unusually high ratio of carbon monoxide (CO) to water, as if a scoop of ice cream suddenly had too much syrup. The authors of a new study set out to find where this imbalance comes from.

In its youth, our Sun radiated about 30% less energy than it does today: this faint young Sun paradox long troubled planetary scientists: with such a heat deficit, Earth's oceans should have frozen, yet geological evidence says otherwise.