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Pebbles Form Planets
It starts with static electricity and dust swirling around young stars
Explore The secret to the formation of planets may lie in ordinary static electricity—the same phenomenon that can make your hair stand on end or give you an electric shock after walking across a carpet. The findings help resolve a mystery that has shrouded something called the bouncing barrier—the size threshold that particles must reach in order to rely on gravity to join with other particles—says lead author of the study Jens Teiser, an astrophysicist at the University of Duisburg-Essen in Germany. But that wasn’t enough time to reach a conclusion, so in 2022 the researchers performed an experiment onboard a suborbital rocket that launched from Kiruna in northern Sweden, to observe how the particles behaved during six minutes of weightlessness.
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