News of another extrasolar planet hardly grabs headlines
anymore, now that scientists have pushed the count far above
200. But yesterday a group of astrophysicists says it may have
uncovered evidence of a foreign planet being born. The actual
image they captured shows an absence of material around a young
star, AB Aurigae. This void could be evidence of an object-in-
formation that may be somewhere between 5 and 37 times the mass
of Jupiter. Astrophysicist Ben Oppenheimer of the American
Museum of Natural History suggests that it could be a planet or
a brown dwarf—an object that falls somewhere between a planet
and a star. But good looks at these extrasolar objects are hard
to come by because their host stars—the ones they orbit
about—outshine them. "The image produced speaks directly to the
biggest, unresolved question of planet formation—how the thick
disk of debris and gas evolves into a thin, dusty region with
planets," says Julian Christou of the National Science
Foudnation. The work will be detailed in t