Stars twice as massive as the Sun can feature carbon-monoxide-rich gas disks around them, contrary to the expectation that ultraviolet radiation would have stripped away the gas.

Meredith Hughes at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut, and her colleagues used the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array in northern Chile to probe the regions around 24 young star systems, only about 5 million to 10 million years old. They chose stars surrounded by a disk of dust debris — resembling a scaled-up version of the Solar System's Kuiper belt. This leftover material could form new planets, including gas giants. Surprisingly, three of the larger stars in the sample had strong carbon monoxide emissions.

Astrophys. J. 828, 25 (2016)