{
  "id": 612062,
  "title": "Every Snowflake Needs a Speck of Dust and So Do Planets",
  "url": "https://urgent.news/2026/08/11/every-snowflake-needs-a-speck-of-dust-and-so-do-planets",
  "topic": "science",
  "section": "Science",
  "published": "2026-08-11T21:33:44.000Z",
  "source": {
    "name": "Universe Today",
    "slug": "universe-today",
    "url": "https://www.universetoday.com/articles/every-snowflake-needs-a-speck-of-dust-and-so-do-planets"
  },
  "original_language": "en",
  "account": null,
  "summary": "A snowflake cannot form out of nothing. Water vapour will sit in the air quite happily, supercooled and reluctant, until it finds a speck of dust to build on and then it crystallises around it. Cosmochemists have had a version of that problem for decades. The early Solar System was a furnace of gas, and the first solid grains had to condense out of it somehow, yet condensing from a perfectly…",
  "key_points": [],
  "editors_take": null,
  "illustration": null,
  "coverage": {
    "outlets": 1,
    "also_reported_by": []
  },
  "ai_generated": true,
  "disclaimer": "Summaries, key points and the editor’s take are written by software from other outlets’ reporting and may contain errors — always check the linked original."
}