Submission + - Winking Star Decoded as Root of Planetary System (nytimes.com)
sam1am writes: "The New York Times reports on a paper published in Nature about the formation of planetary systems. William Herbst of Wesleyan led a team of scientists who observed the KH 15D star, at a distance of about 2,400 light years. "This is the first step in going from smoke particles to macroscopic things like planets and asteroids," noted Dr. Herbst, "the geometry of KH 15D is perfectly aligned from our point of view to use the star to probe the disk from different viewpoints." An animation of their observations is also available."
