2010

Boston - Harvard Most searches for planets around other stars, also known as exoplanets, focus on Sun-like stars. Those searches have proven successful, turning up more than 400 alien worlds. However, Sun-like stars aren't the only potential homes for planets. New research by astronomers at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) and the National Optical Astronomy Observatory (NOAO) confirms that planet formation is a natural by-product of star formation, even around stars much heftier than the Sun. "We see evidence of planet formation on fast forward," said Xavier Koenig of the CfA, who presented the research in a press conference today at the 215th meeting of the American Astronomical Society. Koenig and his colleagues examined the star-forming region named W5, which lies about 6,500 light-years away in the constellation Cassiopeia. They employed NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope and the ground-based Two Micron All-Sky Survey (2MASS) to look for infrared evidence of dusty planet-forming disks.