New Mexico State University Astronomy Associate Professor Wladimir Lyra has received a new $450,000 grant from the National Science Foundation that will allow him to learn more about planetary formation by studying a star system over 500 light-years away.

The grant funds a three-year collaborative research project between principal investigator Lyra, co-principal investigator and Assistant Professor Cassandra Hall from the University of Georgia and NMSU astronomy Ph.D. student Eleanor Serviss. Their research focuses on a star known as AB Aurigae and the disk that surrounds it. Within this disk orbits the first, and currently the only, credible claim of a detection of a planet that formed via a method known as gravitational instability.