The University of Michigan was part of a research team that used the world’s most powerful space telescope to provide new insights into a longstanding question in astronomy.
Namely, how do gas giants like Jupiter form in other planetary systems when they’re larger and farther away from their star? Do they, like Jupiter and its gas giant neighbors, start out with rocky cores and build up gas? Or, as predicted by some models, do they form more like celestial objects known as brown dwarfs? That is, do they come from perturbations in a giant gas-rich disc that collapse under their own gravity?
To read more, please follow this link to Michigan News.
