Vanishing dust belt around a Sun-like distant star baffles scientists

A dust belt around a Sun-like distant star mysteriously disappeared leaving scientists few clues to how it disappeared. Researchers had spotted the cloud of dust circling the young star TYC 8241 2652 in the Scorpius-Centaurus stellar nursery in data gathered by the Infrared Astronomical Satellite while it was was surveying the sky back in 1983.

It would usually take hundreds of thousands of years for the amount of dust to dissipate. In 2008 the dust was just the same as 25 years ago. But by 2010, when TYC was viewed by NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE), the dust was almost all gone. According to researchers the quickly vanishing disk may help scientists better understand how planets formed in early solar systems, including our own.