Astronomical Forensics Uncover Planetary Disks in Hubble Archive

HubbleSite NewsCenter -- Latest News Releases: Get larger image formats Nearly 2,000 planets have been confirmed to be orbiting other stars in our galaxy. But the details of planet birth and formation are sparse. The conventional wisdom, dating back to a hypothesis by philosopher Immanuel Kant the Marquis de Laplace in the late 1700s, considered the orbit of the planets in our solar system to be the skeleton of disks of dust and gas that swirled around the newborn sun. The dust particles clumped...