Heat from such high levels of radioactivity could have melted rocks in the early solar system, making them more likely to stick together and form planets, he said.
They realized that hot gaseous material stripped from a stellar atmosphere would simply dissipate in space; it would not condense to form planets. Hence, the basic idea that a solar system could form through stellar encounters was untenable.
"We can say what the fluctuations in the early universe would have looked like, and these are the fluctuations that grow to form planets, stars and galaxies," Afshordi told the Guardian.
Although it is known that a supernova, the violent explosion of a star, is one source of cosmic dust, the origin of the large amounts of dust needed to form planets and stars like the Sun has long been unclear.
At the same time, we have a discovery from the European Space Agency's Herschel Space Observatory that for the first time allows us to understand where the dust that helped form planets and stars came from in the early universe.
The basis of this model was that material was drawn out from one or both stars when the two bodies passed at close range, and this material later coalesced to form planets.
The one-step process still tends to form planets larger than Uranus and Neptune.
The results could mean that brown dwarfs can form planets, the researchers report 21 October in Science.
These titanic explosions, which mark the deaths of giant stars, produce the heavy elements--including oxygen and carbon--necessary to form planets, life, and people.
"We don't know if Earths are common," he says, "but we're learning that most stars form planets--that's pretty exciting".
But these latter substances have not been found in the clouds of dust and gas around new stars that can form planets, making their link to life tenuous.
