By Ron Cowen
Astronomers this week announced that they have discovered signs of an asteroid belt circling a sunlike star 41 light-years from Earth. If confirmed, the belt would be the closest known analog to the asteroid belt in the solar system and a possible indicator of rocky planets.
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Charles Beichman of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena and his colleagues base their findings on infrared observations of the star HD 69830 with the Spitzer Space Telescope. A spectrometer on Spitzer revealed that a thick disk of warm, micrometer-size dust particles surrounds the star, which has a mass and age similar to that of the sun.