Small, rocky planets that could resemble Earth or Mars may be forming around one of the hundreds of stars in the Pleiades cluster, astronomers reported Wednesday.The star, known as HD 23514, is surrounded by an extraordinary number of hot dust particles that could be the “building blocks of planets.” said Inseok Song, a staff scientist at NASA’s Spitzer Science Center at the California Institute of Technology.
“This is the first clear evidence for planet formation in the Pleiades, and the results we are presenting may well be the first observational evidence that terrestrial planets like those in our solar system are quite common,” said Joseph Rhee of the University of California at Los Angeles, who led the study.
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