The Mystery of the Stardust Cloud That Vanished    • Share   •
Read Later JPL-Caltech / NASA   Stars wrapped in warm, dusty
disks sound cozy, and in cosmic terms, they are. They are the
incubators in which planets like our own — rocky, and fairly
close to their parent sun — are most likely to form. In these
disks, dust is coalescing and tiny chunks of rock are colliding
to become larger masses of matter and, over the course of
millions of years, planets. The theory is far from perfect,
though, and computer models meant to simulate the process raise
as many questions as they answer. Astronomers have lately tried
to remedy that, watching dust-shrouded stars for any small
changes — maybe a tiny shift in the amount of starlight making
its way to Earth — that they can plug into the models to help
make them fit reality.  Carl Melis, a postdoctoral fellow at the
University of California, San Diego, and his collaborators chose
one of the dustiest stars ever seen — one that goes by the
prosaic name TYC 8241 2652 — and