It is a popularly known fact that carbon is the basis of all terrestrial life. It is found in unusually high quantities 63 light-years away in space! Astronomers detected huge quantities of carbon in an infant solar system. It is located around nearby star Beta Pictoris, which is 63 light-years away. Beta Pictoris is almost twice our Sun’s mass and aged between 8 and 20 million years.
FUSE–NASA’s Far Ultraviolet Spectroscopic Explorer made the new research possible. And the Hubble Space Telescope’s imaging spectrograph provided with the data. The new measurements reveal the “most complete inventory of gas in any debris disk,”. It may change the picture radically.
Lead author Aki Roberge said,
For years we’ve looked to this early forming solar system as one that might be going through the same processes our own solar system did when the rocky planets, including Earth, were forming... But we got a big surprise–there is much more carbon gas than we expected. Something very different is going on.
The research is published in the June 8, 2006 issue of Nature.
Via; Physorg
