Can you imagine a planet with entire mountains made of diamonds and life forms so strange they make the the Star Wars Cantina look like an ultra-conservative Republican convention? If not, don't worry. You have millions of years to come up with the right mental image for the future planets over at Beta Pictoris.

Beta Pictoris is a newly forming solar syatem some 60 lightyears away. Scientists have detected large amounts of carbon gas, the basis of life on earth, there and they say in a few million years the carbon-rich sector could give rise to planets inhabited by creatures people at Industrial Light Magic would love to meet.

"If carbon-rich worlds are forming in Beta Pictoris, they might be covered with tar and smog, with mountains made of giant diamonds, life on such a planet is not implausible, but it certainly would be exotic." said Marc Kuchner, extrasolar planets expert from the NASA Goddard Goddard Space Flight Center.

The gas-covered Beta Pictoris, nearly twice as large as our Sun but at less than 20 million years old (a baby in space years), is a bit of a galactic mystery. In theory, the carbon gas should not be there at all because the star's radiation should have blown it away. One early explanation for this anomaly is that mass of hydrogen or other gas breaking the outflow. But the new finding by NASA's Far Ultraviolet Spectroscopic Explorer (FUSE) and data from the Hubble Space Telescope reveals that the braking material is actually carbon, which is very abundant in Beta Pictoris compared to other elements.

Where did the carbon came from? Most scientists think it formed during collisions of asteroids and comets in Beta Pictoris' debris disk. This is based on the assumption that those asteroids and comets were very rich in carbon - a fact that is not supported by analysis of asteroids and comets in found our own solar system. Which could mean two things, researchers say, one is that  asteroids over there could have more graphite or methane than the ones we have here. Others say younger asteroids and comets could have more carbon content which is fritttered away by age.

At any rate, comets and asteroids are believed the building blocks of terrestrial Earth-like planets. "It could eventually lead to the creation of very exotic planets, like those in the realm of science fiction almost," says study team-member Aki Roberge of NASA Goddard Space Flight Center.

In addition to diamond mountains, the future planets could have have methane atmospheres similar to Saturn's moon Titan and
that future planets forming there might one day resemble the ones in our system. "We might be observing processes that occurred early in our solar system's development," said another study team-member Alycia Weinberger of the Carnegie Institution of Washington. Roberge said the answers to the Beta Pictoris Mystery will come only after the deployment of some future ultraviolet space telescope. The Atacama Large Millimeter Array, a ground-based radio telescope scheduled for completion in 2012 might also work help solve the case.