Weighing the planet-forming disc around a nearby star

The 10 million-year-old star TW Hydrae is surrounded by a dense disc of planet-forming materials. Using ESA’s Herschel space observatory, astronomers have been able to ‘weigh’ the star’s disc with ten times higher accuracy than ever before, finding it still has enough mass to spawn 50 Jupiter-mass planets, several million years after most other stars have already given birth.