Planets may rise around dead star: NASA LOS ANGELES, April 5 (Xinhua)-- NASA's Spitzer space telescope has uncovered evidence that planets may form out of a dead star's ashes, astronomers reported on Wednesday.

California Institute of Technology -- For the first time, the planets orbiting a pulsar have been "weighed" by measuring precisely variations in the time it takes them to complete an orbit, according to a team of astronomers from the California Institute of Technology and Pennsylvania State University.Reporting at the summer meeting of the American Astronomical Society, Caltech postdoctoral researcher Maciej Konacki and Penn State astronomy professor Alex Wolszczan announced today that masses of two of the three known planets orbiting a rapidly spinning pulsar 1,500 light-years away in the constellation Virgo have been successfully measured.