The discovery of dusty disks--the building blocks of planets--around two of the most massive stars known suggests that planets might form and survive in surprisingly hostile environments.

The discovery was made through NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope observations of two hypergiant stars in the Large Magellanic Cloud--the Milky Way's nearest neighboring galaxy--by a team led by Joel Kastner, a professor at Rochester Institute of Technology's Chester F. Carlson Center for Imaging Science. His team's findings will appear in the Feb. 10 issue of Astrophysical Journal Letters.

So far, searches for planets outside the solar system have been restricted to sun-like stars. All of these stars are older, dimmer and cooler objects than hypergiants, which are extraordinarily large and luminous but shorter-lived by billions of years.

Originally posted by Rasobasi420
This is one more increase in the value on N in The Drake Equation. if the value of Fp has increased, so do the chances of life existing elsewhere in the galaxy. Soon we won't be able to deny the probability of life in other solar systems.

Originally posted by cmdrkeenkid

Originally posted by Rasobasi420
This is one more increase in the value on N in The Drake Equation. if the value of Fp has increased, so do the chances of life existing elsewhere in the galaxy. Soon we won't be able to deny the probability of life in other solar systems.

Unfortunately the Drake Equation is fairly subjective... If you want you can have there be life in every solar system, or you can make there be only one. It just depends on how you plug in the numbers.