A DUST cloud around a young red dwarf star 33 light years away promises astronomers a close-up view of planet formation. The cloud, recently spotted around AU Microscopium, appears hollow, suggesting that most of the interior dust has been swept up as planets have formed. The Hubble Space Telescope or large ground-based telescopes with adaptive optics should be able to reveal what is inside.
“This is going to be one of those really special systems,” says Michael Liu of the University of Hawaii in Honolulu, whose findings will appear in Science. AU Microscopium is very young for our region of the galaxy, at just 12 million…
