The dust cloud L183, identified as a likely region of future solar systems, was imaged by the Spitzer Space Telescope for research published in 2010. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Observatoire de Paris/CNRS
Our solar system began as a cloud of gas and dust. Over time, gravity slowly pulled these bits together into the Sun and planets we recognize today. While not every system is friendly to life, astronomers want to piece together how these systems are formed. A challenge to this research is the opacity of dust clouds to optical wavelengths (the ones that humans can see). So, astronomers are experimenting with different wavelengths, such as infrared light, to better see the center of dense dust clouds, where young stars typically form.
Recently, astronomers used data from NASA’s Spitzer Space T...
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