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What do the UX Tauri, RW Aurigae, AS 205, Z CMajoris, and FU Orionis have in common? They are young star systems with disks where planets can form. It appears that the discs were disturbed by interstellar flybys or other close encounters in the past. Astronomers want to know: did the event interfere with the formation of planets in the disk? What are they doing? Does this happen on other systems? And, did our solar system experience strange encounters in its youth? Some of the answers lie in research by astronomer Nicolás Cuello of the University of the Grenoble Alpes who heads a team studying the role of interstellar flight. In a recent paper, they discussed the processes this system goes through. They check the probability of a given disk having a flyby/encounter and classify the encounter type. The team is also studying a set of disks to understand what happens during each type of encounter and see the implications of flybys for planet formation in other systems. Finally, ...

Credit: University of Portsmouth The mystery of how the universe’s first quasars formed—something that has baffled scientists for nearly 20 years—has now been solved by a team of astrophysicists whose findings were published in Natural . The existence of more than 200 quasars powered by supermassive black holes less than a billion years after the Big Bang remains one of the outstanding problems in astrophysics because it is never fully understood how they formed so early. The expert team led by Dr. Daniel Whalen of the University of Portsmouth has discovered that the first quasars formed naturally in turbulent conditions from reservoirs of rare gas in the early universe. Dr. Whalen, from the University’s Institute of Cosmology and Gravity, said: “This discovery is very exciting because it has reversed 20 years of thinking about the origin of the universe’s first supermassive black hole. This vi...

The mystery of how the universe’s first quasars formed – something that has puzzled scientists for nearly 20 years – has now been solved by a team of astrophysicists whose findings were published in Nature today. The existence of more than 200 quasars powered by supermassive black holes less than a billion years after the Big Bang remains one of the outstanding problems in astrophysics because it is never fully understood how they formed so early. A team of experts led by Dr Daniel Whalen from the University of Portsmouth has discovered that the first quasars formed naturally in the turbulent conditions of a rare gas reservoir in the early universe. The first supermassive black holes were simply a natural consequence of the formation of structures in the cosmology of cold dark matter – children of the cosmic web. Dr Whalen, from the University’s Institute of Cosmology and Gravity, said: “This discovery is very exciting because it has reversed 20 years of thinking about...