Dec. 10, 2004 — Dusty planetary debris around stars about the size of our sun have been spotted by two of NASA's orbiting telescopes, giving astronomers snapshots of the processes that were at the beginning of our own solar system.

The images were captured by the Hubble Space Telescope and the Spitzer Space Telescope, according to a NASA press release.

Spitzer focussed in on discs around mature stars known to have planets orbiting them. Hubble, meanwhile, photographed the most detailed image to date of a bright disc circling a young, sun-like star, only about 50 to 250 million years old.

"Young stars have huge reservoirs of planet-building materials, while older ones have only leftover piles of rubble. Hubble saw the reservoirs and Spitzer, the rubble," said Charles Beichman of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., in the press release.

The six older stars studied by Spitzer were all around 4 billion years old, with gas planets, and possibly rocky planets, orbiting them.

Hubble's target star could already have gas planets, with rocky planets like Earth possibly still forming. Before now, the debris discs around stars the size of the sun had not often been observed because they're fainter than those around bigger stars, NASA said.

"The new Hubble image gives us the best look so far at reflected light from a disc around a star the mass of the sun," said Hubble study lead author, David Ardila of the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, in the press release. "Basically, it shows one of the possible pasts of our own solar system."

Hubble's observations will be published in the Astronomical Journal and the Astrophysical Journal Letters. The Spitzer pictures will appear in the Astrophysical Journal.