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Thursday, October 28, 2010

Photo: Planet-Forming Disk Spotted Around Dead Star


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A still image from an artist's animation shows a pulsar—the rapidly rotating core of a dead massive star—surrounded by a disk of debris from the star's explosion.

Scientists announced today that they found such a disk around a pulsar 13,000 light-years from Earth and that the debris could eventually clump together to form planets.

Image courtesy NASA/JPL-Caltech