Giant celestial disk hard to explain

Giant celestial disk hard to explain: About 80 light-years away, an enormous, dusty ring swirls around a sunlike star, with a defined inner edge that is probably sculpted by a planet orbiting at 140 times Earth’s distance from the sun. A planet located so far from a sunlike star presents an astronomical conundrum.

(Hubble Space Telescope images of the star HD 202862 at two roll angles of the telescope. The top panels show the original images; the bottom panels show the same view after software subtraction of the star’s light itself, revealing the faint, newly-discovered debris disk. Credit: J. Krist et al./Astronomical Journal)
“‘How do you get a planet out that far? We don’t know how to form something out there,’ astronomer Karl Stapelfeldt of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., said on June 14 at the 220th Meeting of the American Astronomical Society. Stapelfeldt and a team led by John Krist of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., used the Hubble Space Telescope to study 10 stars suspected of hosting large debris disks. Hubble saw a ring around only one, HD 202862, which resides near the southern constellations Grus and Microscopium.”
“Everything about the dusty circle ...