Physicists were able to demonstrate in the lab how planets could have formed in a first of observations of individual collisions between charged particles.

The scientists said that instead of just dissipating, dust particles are captured and accumulated into new formations.

A team of researchers at the University of Chicago conducted an experiment to look at the interaction and clustering of charged particles and how this could have led to the early stages of planetary formation. The researchers published their findings online in the journal Nature Physics.

In the study led by physics graduate student Victor Lee, the researchers created a low-gravity environment, using a free-falling stream of particles. They tracked the stream with the use of a high-speed video camera that also fell along with it, and saw how the charged particles undergo attractive or repulsive trajectories in their mutual electrostatic interactions.

According to the researchers, polarization effects are important in the capture and aggregations of particles in multiple collisions.

"This can have implications for the very earliest stages of planet formation," said the William J. Friedman and Alicia Townsend physics Professor Heinrich Jaeger, a co-author of the study. He added that the formation of planets is believed to have been rooted in collisions among grains of interstellar dust. "Single head-on collisions typically do not dissipate enough energy to lead to sticking."

The team's observation found that successive capture of single particles in long-range electrostatic interactions led to cluster growth. This is a first, after scientists' long speculation that electrostatic interactions may help stick together colliding particles, instead of flying away.

According to Jaeger, their study points out that the effects that were tracked directly with granular molecules have a significant importance to molecules, colloids, nanoparticles and colloids, which are much smaller particles.

In another study published in AIP, findings show calculations explaining some granular molecule configurations seen in the experiment done by Lee's team.

Biophysics, materials science, battery operation, ionic solutions and thermodynamics chemical processes, ion pairing, protein binding and DNA studies can take advantage of this new observation, in their individual fields of development and research.