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Posted by baalke on July 25, 2007, 2:01 pm
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http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/spitzer/multimedia/spitzer20070724.html
Spitzer Finds Evidence for Planets with Four Parents
NASA
July 24, 2007
How many stars does it take to "raise" a planet? In our own solar
system, it took only one -- our sun. However, new research from NASA's
Spitzer Space Telescope shows that planets might be forming in systems
with as many as four stars.
This artist's concept illustrates one such quadruple-star system,
called
HD 98800. The system is still relatively young, at 10 million years
old.
One of its two pairs of stars is known to be circled by a dusty disk,
which contains materials that are thought to clump together to form
planets. When Spitzer set its infrared gaze on the disk, it detected
gaps. How did the gaps get there? One possible answer is that planets
are growing in size and carving out lanes in the dust.
Spitzer found two gaps in the disk. The inner gap is about as far away
from its central stars as Mars and the asteroid belt are from our sun.
The outer gap is about as far away from its central stars as Jupiter
is
from the sun.
HD 98800 is located 150 light-years away in the constellation TW
Hydrae.
Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA
+ High-resolution JPEG (1.7Mb)
<http://www.nasa.gov/images/content/182895main_spitzer-20070724.jpg>
+ More detailed description
<http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/spitzer/news/spitzer-20070724.html>
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