The Hubble Space Telescope has discovered two possible planets, one of them 20 times the mass of Jupiter, circling the nearby star Beta Pictoris. According to scientists, the images of dust disks captured by Hubble suggests the two planets are forming in two different planes.

The first dust disk was first sighted using ground-based telescopes in 1984 but it was Hubble that confirmed the warp in the disk in 2000. Several teams of astronomers attributed the warp to a planet in a tilted orbit out of the plane of the main disk. Two years later infrared images taken by the Keck II Observatory in Hawaii showed a smaller inner disk could be present around the star in a region the size of our solar system.  The possible existence of the two dust disks could be evidence that one or more planets orbiting the star exist.

Beta Pictoris lies in the southern constellation of Pictor ("Easel") 63 light-years away between Canopus and the Small Magellanic Cloud. Although the star is much younger than our sun, it is twice as massive and nine times more luminous.

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.

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