By Ron Cowen
Mike Meyer was just 28, finishing up his Ph.D. thesis on baby stars, when his career turned to dust. Astronomers announced the discovery of a planet orbiting a sunlike star beyond the solar system. With planet hunting becoming the hottest topic in astronomy, Meyer, then at Amherst (Mass.) College, realized that he was well positioned to jump into the fray. Researchers had suggested since the 1980s that dust disks around stars were signposts of planets, and Meyer had just agreed to join a team in Heidelberg, Germany, that was studying such disks with a recently launched observatory.
That was 10 years ago. The observatory is now defunct, but Meyer is a lead investigator with NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope, the premier observatory for studying dust. Currently based at the University of Arizona in Tucson, Meyer and his colleagues have discovered hundreds of debris disks since Spitzer’s launch in 2003. Some circle sunlike stars only a few million years old, others orbit senior citizens that have been shining for several billion years.