Open clusters like Orion have low fertility rate

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While a Hubble Space Telescope image of visible light emitted by a protoplanetary disk in the Orion Nebula called proplyd 170-337 shows hot ionized gas (red) surrounding and streaming off of a disk (yellow) 1.3 mm radio observations by CARMA and SMA  ...
While a Hubble Space Telescope image of visible light emitted by a protoplanetary disk in the Orion Nebula called proplyd 170-337 shows hot, ionized gas (red) surrounding and streaming off of a disk (yellow), 1.3 mm radio observations by CARMA and SMA reveal the dust disk hiding within the hot gas (contours). This protoplanetary disk has a mass more than one hundredth that of the sun, the minimum needed to form a Jupiter-sized planet. (Bally et al 2000/Hubble Space Telescope & Eisner et al 2008/CARMA, SMA)

A detailed survey of stars in the Orion Nebula has found that fewer than 10 percent have enough surrounding dust to make Jupiter-sized planets, according to a report by astronomers at the University of California, Berkeley, the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.


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All News summaries for July 08, 2008