CrazyNeutrino said:
Nearby red dwarfs could reveal planet secrets
An accidental find of a collection of young red dwarf stars close to our solar system could give us a rare glimpse of slow-motion planet formation.
Astronomers from the Australian National University (ANU) and University of New South Wales (UNSW) in Canberra found large disks of dust around two of the stars, telltale signs of planets in the process of forming.
“However, other stars of this age usually don’t have disks any more. The red dwarf disks seem to live longer than those of hotter stars like the Sun. We don’t understand why,” said Murphy. The discovery of objects like these two challenges current theories about planet formation, said Warrick Lawson from UNSW Canberra. “It suggests the planet forming process can endure a lot longer than previously thought,” he said.
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I dislike the word “accidental” in this context.
We DO understand why. Disks like this around hotter stars such as our Sun were destroyed by extreme UV radiation in the T-Tauri stage of star formation. This is well known. Red dwarfs, being intrinsically much fainter, produced much less extreme UV light during formation and therefore have been able to hold onto their protoplanetary disks for much longer.
As for the longer period of planet forming. I have occasionally been startled by how brief the planet-forming process has been around our Sun. For the asteroid belt in our solar system 4600 million years old, the process of formation was about 90% complete in just 3 million years.