Lunar Nursery

A swirl of gas and dust may be a moon-formation zone

- By Elise Cutts

FOR THE FIRST TIME, scientists have directly detected molecules in a Frisbee of gas and dust swirling around an alien gas-giant planet. “I didn’t think this was possible,” says astronomer Sierra Grant of Carnegie Science in Washington, D.C. Typically such a faint signal would be invisible in the glare of a star. Grant and her coauthor Gabriele Cugno of the University of Zürich, who published the results recently in the Astrophysical Journal Letters, think the carbon-rich disk is a lunar nursery and already have plans to observe several more; eventually researchers might be able to detect gaps carved in such disks by nascent moons.