Nearby star appears to host its own Kuiper belt
DOI: 10.1063/PT.5.028914
Nature : The Kuiper belt is the region between 30 AU and 50 AU from the Sun. It is filled with mostly icy remains of the formation of the solar system as well as the dwarf planets Pluto, Haumea, and Makemake. Now, Thayne Currie of the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan and his colleagues have found a star 360 light-years from Earth with a ring of debris orbiting at roughly the same distance as the Kuiper belt is from our Sun. The parent star is 15 million years old, significantly younger than the Sun. That means the system could provide some clues about what our solar system looked like very early in its existence. The team’s observations revealed that the star is slightly off center, which suggests that a planet with a mass roughly the same as Jupiter’s is also present.
