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This is Scientific American’s 60-Second Science. I’m Steve Mirsky. got a minute?

Earth-like planets have the potential to form around many—and perhaps most—of the nearest stars that are like our sun. Michael Meyer of the University of Arizona announced that discovery Sunday at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement¹ of Science. Meyer says that between 20 and 60 percent of the stars are candidates for the development of rocky planets. 

The researchers is using the NASA Spitzer Space Telescope. Meyer explains: “With Spitzer, we detect the heat radiation of dust grains, not unlike the smoke that you will see rising from chimneys.” Models say that the observed warm dust is consistent with small rocky bodies smashing into each other.“From those observations of dust, we infer the presence of colliding larger rocky bodies, not unlike asteroids² and other things in our solar system that we know bang together and generate dust. By tracing that dust, we trace these dynamical processes that we think led to the formation of the terrestrial planets in our solar system.”

Thanks for the minute, for Scientific American's 60-Second Science from the AAAs meeting in Boston, I'm Steve Mirsky