ET coming closer: Suns like ours spotted with planetary debris disc
Dec 13, 2004 18: 36 EST
Previously published Dec 12, 2004 22: 10 EST
Spitzer Space Telescope have revealed, for the first time, suns like ours that have both planets and a debris disc.
We have seen suns and detected planets around them before, and spied the "building blocks" - a "debris disc" eqvivalent to our own Kuiper Belt (a band of icy bodies beyond the orbit of Neptune). But we've never seen stars+planets+debris. Until now!
Infrared glow
A team at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, has used Spitzer telescope to search for the infrared glow of dust around 26 stars already known to host planets. The researchers found discs around six stars of comparable age to the Sun.
-220°C
Planets seem to have hollowed out the central part of each disc, and the disc's are cold (-220°C) - indicating a distance similar to that of our Kuiper Belt.
A NASA briefing explained on Thursday: "Prior to these observations, we really didn't know of any systems that harbored both planets and discs other than our own solar system.
Pieces of the puzzle complete
The fact that, until now, astronomers had discovered 130 or so known extrasolar planets without seeing debris discs around any of them "is like knowing you formed a house but not being able to find the construction materials. The new observations complete the picture of the planet formation process".
Any time now...
But why only six of the 26 observed? More stars may have had discs that were too faint to detect. Some researches believe it's only a question of a few years, before we detect the first earth like planets.
Image Artist's concept of the Spitzer Space Telescope, courtesy of NASA, and E.T. courtesy Spielberg.
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