By Ron Cowen
Two orbiting observatories have for the first time homed in on planetary debris circling sunlike stars. The Hubble Space Telescope has taken the first visible-light image of the dusty debris around a young star with a sunlike mass. Colliding bodies left over from planet formation probably generated the debris. The Spitzer Space Telescope has found the first hints that six much older stars known to have planets also host debris disks.
Most previously detected debris disks had turned up around much more massive stars (SN: 10/23/04, p. 262: Available to subscribers at Messy Findings: Planets encounter a violent world).