The discoveries revolutionized planetary science, forcing scientists to revise their theories about how the Universe is structured. All of suddent, hunting planets became one of the hottest kinds of astronomy. Spotting a good candidate for a faraway solar system, the hunter can turn to the powerful Hubble Space Telescope orbiting above Earth's murky atmosphere. Pointing Hubble toward the candidate solar system, the astronmer will look for a telltale dust ring around the star. The ring of dust could be the genesis of planets.
Dust rings around a star suggest that unseen planets lurk there.
Astronomers say it takes a planet's gravitational pull to organize dust into a ring, in much the same way the rings around planets in our Solar System are produced by so-called shepherd moons. HR 4796A has one of the unusual squspects. One example lies in a potential solar system 220 lightyears from Earth around a star astronomers call HR 4796A. Infrared light images of that corner of our Milky Way galaxy revealed a dusty disk that looked like hula hoop. Zooming in, it looked like the planet Saturn of our own Solar System. Suddenly, astronomers were very excited about hunting planets.