Editor's Summary
13 March 2008
Early signs of new planets
The formation of Earth-like planets is thought to start with the coagulation of interstellar grains that are only about 1 
m in diameter to form millimetre (sand), centimetre (pebble) and metre-sized (boulder) objects relatively rapidly. The prospect of observing such small objects in a protoplanetary disk seems pretty remote, but the combination of reflectance spectroscopy and the fortuitous geometry of the dust disk in the KH 15D eclipsing binary system has provided an indirect view of the process. The spectra of the light reflected from the disk are consistent with the presence of sand grains that have grown to about a millimetre in size or larger in the terrestrial zone of the host star.
Authors: Abstractions
doi:10.1038/7184xiib
Letter: Reflected light from sand grains in the terrestrial zone of a protoplanetary disk
William Herbst, Catrina M. Hamilton, Katherine LeDuc, Joshua N. Winn, Christopher M. Johns-Krull, Reinhard Mundt & Mansur Ibrahimov
doi:10.1038/nature06671
First paragraph | Full Text | PDF (841K) | Supplementary information
