MASSIVE and violent solar flares may have saved a nascent Earth from spiralling into the sun during the early stages of planet formation.
In the most commonly accepted model of planet formation, dust particles in the protoplanetary disc around a young star clump together to form rocks, which then stick together to form planetary cores. But the model fails to explain how the cores, once they reach a certain mass, can resist gravitational attraction and keep from falling towards the host star.
That’s where solar flares come in, according to a team working on the Chandra Orion Ultradeep Project. The team studied 1400 embryonic stars in…
