R 66 and R 126

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Artist concept of the stars, sun and planets not drawn to scale

Graph data of the stars

NASA's Spitzer space telescope has identified two stars R 66 or HDE 268835 (30 SM) and R 126 or HD 37974 (70 SM) circled by monstrous dust disks located at Milky Way's nearest neighbor galaxy, the Large Magellanic Cloud. Dust disks around stars are theorised to be the origin of planets.

[edit] Significance

Both stars classify as hypergiant, O class (very large, tremendously hot, and bright). The dust cloud around them surprised astronomers because stars as big as these were thought to be inhospitable to planet formation as they have very strong winds making it difficult/impossible for the dust clouds to "condense" into planets.

Astronomers estimate that the stars' disks are also bloated, spreading all the way out to an orbit about 60 times more distant than Pluto's around the sun. The disks are probably loaded with about ten times as much mass as is contained in the Kuiper Belt. Kastner and his colleagues say these dusty structures might represent the first or last steps of the planet-forming process. If the latter, then the disks can be thought of as enlarged versions of our Kuiper Belt.

"We do not know if planets like those in our [sic] solar system are able to form in the highly energetic, dynamic environment of these massive stars, but if they could, their existence would be a short and exciting one" said Charles Beichman, an astronomer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the California Institute of Technology, both in Pasadena, California.