It shows that planet formation is really ubiquitous in the universe. It's a very robust process and can happen in all sorts of unexpected environments.
What's remarkable here is this process of planet formation, which we associate with the birth of stars, seems to also be able to occur at the end of the stellar lifetime, sort of a renaissance of the system, in some sense.
Suppose you form a neutron star that is close to the upper limit. If enough stuff falls back, it'll push the star over this limit and a black hole will form.
We're amazed that the planet-formation process seems to be so universal. Pulsars emit a tremendous amount of high energy radiation, yet within this harsh environment we have a disk that looks a lot like those around young stars where planets are formed.
Bruno Rossi was a giant at MIT, and as an MIT professor, I am humbled to receive an award named in his honor.
It's like throwing a baseball straight up into the air. Unless you're throwing it really, really fast, it's eventually going to fall back down on you.
This disk looks remarkably like those also seen around ordinary young stars in which planets are known to form.
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