AWI0005x3s tagged posts

An artist’s conception of this unusual system. Credit: Courtesy of Jonathan Holden/Disk Detective

A group of citizen scientists and professional astronomers, including Carnegie’s Jonathan Gagné, joined forces to discover an unusual hunting ground for exoplanets. They found a star surrounded by the oldest known circumstellar disk – a primordial ring of gas and dust that orbits around a young star and from which planets can form as the material collides and aggregates.The team described a newly identified red dwarf star with a warm circumstellar disk, of the kind associated with young planetary systems. Circumstellar disks around red dwarfs like this one are rare to begin with, but this star, called AWI0005x3s, appears to have sustained its disk for an exceptionally long time.

“Most disks o...