Finding Planets is Easier than we Thought: Part Two – Less Dusty Sun-Like Stars

Yesterday I wrote about young stars that had a habitable zone further away than we thought, and how this would help us spot habitable planets more easily in the future. Today is the second news story this week dealing with finding planets, and it deals with more familiar Sun-like stars and their dusty planetary discs. Dust is both a good thing and a bad thing when looking for planets orbiting other stars.  Dust tells us that there is a high likelihood of finding planets, but too much dust blocks out the planets that we look for.  Warm dust is worse...

Galaxy’s Ring of Star formation shines face on

I’ve seen a lot of lovely images from  the Spitzer Space Telescope.  It takes infrared images and can see the fine structure of galaxies, where stars are forming and where they are not forming.  The photos paint a picture of the history and evolution of a galaxy.  The latest image released last week shows some amazing features. The Cyan light in the image is a combination of blue and green coloured light representing infrared wavelengths of light at 3.4 and 4.5 microns.  This wavelength shows the stellar population in the galaxy.  The red light is representing dust features that glow...