
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: TUESDAY, June 14, 1994                   TAG: 9406240005
SECTION: NATL/INTL                    PAGE: A2   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: 
DATELINE: WASHINGTON                                 LENGTH: Short

CLOUDS SUPPORT THEORY OF ORIGIN

Great pancake-shaped clouds of dust swirling around at least half the stars in a nearby region lend strong support for the theory that Earth was formed out of just such a disk 4.5 billion years ago, an astronomer says.

``This provides a strong proof that protoplanetary disks are a common part in star formation,'' said Dr. Robert C. O'Dell of Rice University.

The new evidence comes from pictures taken by the Hubble Space Telescope of the Orion nebula - a giant gas cloud only 1,500 light years from Earth where new stars are being born.

O'Dell looked at 100 stars of a field estimated to contain 3,000, and found that the disks of dust are around 56 of them. He calls the disks ``proplyds.''

All of the stars are very young, less than a million years old, he told a news conference.

The clouds are visible because they are framed against the glow of hot stars in the vicinity.

O'Dell discovered the proplyds in images taken by the Hubble in 1992 before its vision was fully restored last December. The new images, he said, bolster his theory, because they prove that the pictures show disks, not shells of dust as some astronomers suggested.

\ Associated Press

by CNB