planetesimal

It's not quite that extreme with planetesimals, although a very large number of them would be required to make a planet.

After the planets are made, many of these planetesimals are left over.

Something like planetary formation, he thought one night, planetesimals becoming planets.

Alternatively, the planetesimals in this system may have unusual physical properties.

"Mars looks like an iron-cored ball of old planetesimals."

Out of this material are formed planetesimals, which can undergo an accretion process to form planets.

The capture mechanism was very efficient-about 50% of all remaining planetesimals were trapped.

Impact, just like the two planetesimals, he grinned and split his lip even wider, a painful mistake.

As planetesimals collided, various fragments were scattered and produced meteorites.

In the earliest solar system history, the sun, the planetesimals and the jovian planets were formed.

This is how planetesimals are often defined.

The oligarchs continue to accrete until planetesimals are exhausted in the disk around them.

During this stage embryos expel remaining planetesimals, and collide with each other.

These were not planetesimals; this was not a solar system in the early stages of being born, but one that had lived and died.

Even after the planets and satellites were just about formed there were still a few planetesimals to be swept up.

The planetesimals that had approximately the same orbits as Jupiter were caught by the increased gravity of the planet.

After the planetesimals grew bigger in sizes, collisions became highly destructive, making further growth more difficult.

The destabilizing interactions with the planetesimals could push the newly forming planets toward their stars.

But calculations show that when all such "planetesimals" are taken into account, their combined mass is no more than a few tenths of the Earth's.

With continuing collisions the larger planetesimals would sweep up the smaller ones until today's planets were formed.

By dating meteorites Patterson was directly dating the age of various planetesimals.

Accretion - the process in which matter of the protoplanetary disk coalesces to form planetesimals.

Back in the late nineteenth century, these building blocks of worlds-then mere hypotheses-were called "planetesimals."

Iron meteorites are derived from planetary cores of asteroids and planetesimals.

They are believed to form out of kilometer-sized planetesimals that attract each other gravitationally and collide.