April 7, 2009--Pools of potentially life-forming chemicals collect around jagged rocks in an artist's conception of a young planet circling a cool star.

New data from the Spitzer Space Telescope suggest that stars cooler than our sun, such as brown dwarfs, might spawn planets that have different mixes of the so-called prebiotic chemicals that gave rise to life on Earth. That's because these stars have different chemicals in their planet-forming disks, which are thought to be a possible source of the prebiotic materials.