August 22, 2008 - Nature News
Astronomers have spotted a disk of dust and ice ringing a young Sun-like star 165 light years away. The icy signature of the disk and the collisions between bodies inferred to be taking place there suggest it is similar to the Sun's Kuiper belt, a disk of small icy bodies that extends beyond Neptune.
"The key new word is icy," says Christine Chen, an astronomer at Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Maryland and lead author of the new study. "This is the first time there's evidence for water ice around a main sequence star."
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For their study of HD 181327, in the constellation of Pictor, Chen and her colleagues used several instruments, including the Hubble Space Telescope and the Gemini South telescope, an 8-metre ground-based telescope in Chile that is sensitive in the near infrared.
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