Suborbital flight experiments test dust particle agglomerates to study planet formation

Planets are formed when dust and rock in a disk around a young star collide and combine to form ever larger bodies. This so-called accretion is not yet fully understood. Astrophysicists at the University of Duisburg-Essen were able to make significant observations of collision speed and electrical charge of the particles through experiments on a suborbital flight. Their results have just been published in Nature Astronomy.