Habitable planet found around nearby star

[Xithras]

33. Fascinating. Thanks!

Very cool site. One of the papers linked from that page also gives another third possibility for the dust cloud, though it's still not all that friendly to life. Apparently there's some evidence that the relative velocities of the material in the dust cloud are very high. Rather than accreting into larger bodies, collisions between cloud objects simply results in a spray of new smaller objects in new and random trajectories. The system, even today, is highly energetic. If it's really 10 billion years old, it must have been far more energetic earlier in its life. Any forming planets would have been continually bombarded and smashed apart by extremely violent impacts, and may continue to be so today.

It's also possible that any planets in the system are relatively young, even though the star itself may be old. The dust cloud around the star may have only recently (as in, the past few billion years) stabilized enough for the dust to begin accreting into larger bodies. If the planets are young, it might explain why so much dust still exists in the system.