From results published in the January 1, 2007 issue of Astrophysical Journal and presented on January 7th at the American Astronomical Association meeting, astronomers Paul Kalas (University of California, Berkeley (UCB), United States), Brenda Matthews (Herzberg Institute of Astrophysics, Victoria, British Columbia, Canada), and James Graham (UCB) report that the particles “are fluffy as snowflakes and are roughly ten times larger than typical interstellar dust grains.” The particles reside in a region called the “birth ring”—an area that UCB astronomers Linda Strubbe and Eugene Chiang predicted to exist in 2005.

Hubble was able to make precise measurements of polarized light from the star AU Microscopii, which is located approximately 32 light-years away in the southern constellation of Microscopium, to deduce various physical properties of the dust within the circumstellar disk. (One light-year—the distance that light travels in one year—is about 5.9 trillion miles [9.5 trillion kilometers].) The circumstellar disk, also called a protoplanetary disk (abbreviated proplyd), is an actively rotating disk of dense gas surrounding a newly formed star.

Reporting on their work James Graham said: “We have seen many seeds of planets and we have seen many planets, but how they go from one to the other is a mystery. These observations begin to help us fill in that gap.”

These scientists conjecture that 4.5 billion years ago the Kuiper Belt (which extends from the orbit of the planet Neptune [about 30 AU] to about 50 AU) probably looked similar to the birth ring of AU Microscopii. Thus, it is theorized that the Earth and the other planets and dwarf planets of our solar system could have developed like these “baby planets” of AU Microscopii, a star only a tiny fraction as old as our 4.6 billion-year-old Sun. (One AU [astronomical unit] equals the distance from the Earth to the Sun—about 93 million miles [150 million kilometers].)

The astronomers worked with the Space Telescope Science Institute (http://www.stsci.edu/resources/), a NASA organization located on the Homewood campus of The Johns Hopkins University, which manages and directs the research performed by the Hubble Space Telescope (http://hubble.nasa.gov/index.php).

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