Earth-like Planets

Earth-like planets have the 1 to form around many—and perhaps most—of the nearest stars that are like our sun. Michael Meyer of the University of Arizona announced that 2 Sunday at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Meyer says that between 20 and 60 percent of the stars are 3 for the 4 of rocky planets.The researchers used the NASA Spitzer Space Telescope. Meyer explains: "With Spitzer, we detect the heat radiation of dust grains, not unlike the smoke you will see rising from chimneys (around here in the Boston area) on a cold day." Models say that the observed warm dust is consistent with small rocky bodies smashing into each other. "From those observations of dust, we infer the 5 of 6 larger rocky bodies, not unlike asteroids and other things in our solar system that we know bang together and generate dust. By tracing that dust, we trace these dynamical processes that we think led to the 7 of the terrestrial planets in our solar system."