Planet-building appears relatively easy to start, but ultraviolet light blasts from nearby massive stars keep most newborn planets in the Orion nebula from reaching adulthood, the scientists reported Thursday. The University of Colorado's John Bally, a fellow author of the research published on Science magazine's Web site, said large, powerful stars in places where stars are born, like Orion, make planetary formation difficult around smaller stars like Earth's sun.
Massive stars are hazardous to planets forming around nearby lower-mass stars.
Using Hubble Space Telescope observations, Bally and Throop confirmed that tiny dust particles orbit youthful stars in discs, growing like snowballs rolled on the ground. But if the discs get to be at least as big as a piece of gravel, they probably will survive, Throop said. About 90 percent of the dusty discs will be left as wilted pancakes of dust within 100,000 years, the scientists said. In the research, the only ones that seem to survive to grow up are those that are tucked off into the quiet corners of the Orion nebula. The Orion nebula is about 1,500 light years from Earth, located in the spiral arm of the Milky Way galaxy shared with Earth.