Web edition: June 15, 2012 Print edition: July 14, 2012; Vol.182
#1 (p. 11) ANCHORAGE, Alaska — About 80 light-years away, an
enormous, dusty ring swirls around a sunlike star, with a
defined inner edge that is probably sculpted by a planet
orbiting at 140 times Earth’s distance from the sun. A planet
located so far from a sunlike star presents an astronomical
conundrum. “How do you get a planet out that far? We don’t know
how to form something out there,” astronomer Karl Stapelfeldt of
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., said on
June 14 at the 220th Meeting of the American Astronomical
Society. Stapelfeldt and a team led by John Krist of the Jet
Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., used the Hubble Space
Telescope to study 10 stars suspected of hosting large debris
disks. Hubble saw a ring around only one, HD 202628, which
resides in the southern constellation Microscopium. Everything
about the dusty circle — the biggest ever observed around a
solar cousin — is huge. In places, the rin