CU Researchers Say They've Found Young Solar Systems
Proplyds' may exist in harsh environment

by Katy Human
Camera Staff Writer
January 10, 2003

The discovery of what appear to be dozens of young solar systems 7,300 light-years from Earth may mean that planets - including those suitable for life - form more easily than astronomers once thought, University of Colorado researchers reported Wednesday. Astronomer John Bally, graduate student Nathan Smith and several colleagues focused a ground-based telescope on the Carina Nebula last year and located what they think are dozens of stellar cocoons called proplyds, "proto-planetary discs" surrounded by clouds of gas.

The finding is unusual, they said, because the Carina Nebula is full of big stars that generate massive amounts of radiation, which can destroy proplyds quickly.

"Carina's 100 times more virulent to star formation than Orion," the only other place astronomers have found proplyds, said Bally. "Yet, despite all that, we still see these discs. It gives us optimism that even in harsh environments ... at least the early stages of solar systems form.

This is a tiny, tiny step to answering that ultimate question, are we alone ... is life common or rare?"

Smith reported the team's discovery Wednesday at the American Astronomical Society meeting in Seattle and has submitted a paper to Astrophysical Journal Letters.

Some of the CU team's scientific peers have expressed reservation about the announcement. The objects captured in the telescope may be uninteresting clumps of gas without embedded stars, not proplyds, they said.

"The real test is whether or not there are stars in them," said Robert O'Dell, an astrophysicist at Vanderbilt University.

Henry Throop, a researcher at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, agreed that it's impossible to know yet if the new objects truly are proplyds.

If they are real, he said, they're fascinating.

"It would mean they could survive this really violent … environment," he said. That could mean the early planetary systems are easy to form, resilient or somehow sheltered, and that there could be lots and lots of planets out there in the universe.

The pictures may also represent what our own solar system looked like 4.5 billion years ago, Bally said. "We are literally learning about our own origins.

Smith said he and his colleagues are now working on a proposal to point the Hubble Space Telescope toward the Carina Nebula sometime later this year or the next, to get larger and clearer images of the objects there.