NASA's FUSE (Far Ultraviolet Spectroscopic Explorer) has discovered enormous amounts of carbon gas in a dusty disk surrounding a young star named Beta Pictoris. The finding could hint at the origins of the carbon-rich worlds of our own solar system and act as a pointer to other older systems in the search for extraterrestrial life.

Beta Pictoris and its fledgling planetary system are mere infants, cosmologically speaking, at just 20 million years. The star lies 60 light years from Earth and is 1.8 times as massive as our sun. Now, Aki Roberge of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, and colleagues have published their observations of this young system in the journal Nature. The new measurements of the Beta Pictoris disk are the first of their kind recorded for this kind of system and settle a long-standing scientific mystery as to how the gas has lingered in the disk. However the measurements also raise new questions about the development of solar systems.

"There is much, much more carbon gas than anyone expected," explains Roberge. "Could this be what our own solar system looked like when it was young? Are we seeing the formation of new types of worlds? Either prospect is fascinating."

The origin of the gaseous carbon lies in unseen asteroids or comets orbiting the star, which have collided with each other and released material into the planetary disk. Until now, the presence of this gas in the Beta Pictoris disk was a mystery explained only by theoretical models that predicted the young's star's intense light would blow any gas away. The fact that there is so much carbon gas in this system explains why the disk retains so much gas—carbon is less susceptible to being blown away and so retards the overall clearing effect.

"What we have learned in the past ten years is that our galaxy is filled with other solar systems, and each one is different from the next," adds NASA's Marc Kuchner. "Beta Pictoris may be telling us something about the variety of planets that might be out there; some might be carbon planets, very different from the Earth." Alternatively, Beta Pictoris might be similar to how our solar system was long ago. While local asteroids and comets don't seem carbon-rich today, some research suggests that certain meteorites called enstatite chondrite meteorites formed in a carbon-rich environment. Some scientists also speculate that Jupiter has a carbon core.

http://fuse.pha.jhu.edu

http://www.dtm.ciw.edu/akir/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beta_Pictoris