A telescope of the U.S. space agency has found a sun-like star, and the discovery could allow astronomers to learn more about "if and where other Earths form," the agency said Wednesday. NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope captured images of "what may be the dusty spray of asteroids banging together in a belt that orbits a star like our Sun," the agency said in a statement. "Asteroids are the leftover building blocks of rocky planets like Earth," said Dr. Charles Beichman of the California Institute of Technology. "We can't directly see other terrestrial planets, but now we can study their dusty fossils." NASA said if the discovery confirms what scientists suspect, "the new asteroid belt would be the first detected around a star about the same age and size as our Sun". The agency said while the asteroid belt resembles the one in our solar system, it is not an identical match because it is much more dense than the belt surrounding the sun that lies between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. "Because this belt has more asteroids than ours, collisions are larger and more frequent, which is why Spitzer could detect the belt," said Dr. George Rieke with the University of Arizona. "Our present-day solar system is a quieter place, with impacts of the scale that killed the dinosaurs occurring only every 100 million years or so." --SP 2249 Local Time 1949 GMT
