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A handout photo provided by the European Southern Observatory on March 7, 2016 shows the sharpest view ever of the dusty disc around the close pair of aging stars IRAS 08544-4431 obtained by the Very Large Telescope Interferometer at ESO’s Paranal Observatory in Chile. For the first time such discs can be compared to the discs around young stars – and they look surprisingly similar. It is even possible that a disc appearing at the end of a star’s life might also create a second generation of planets. The inset shows the VLTI reconstructed image, with the brighter central star removed. The background view shows the surroundings of this star in the constellation of Vela (The Sails). (Photo by AFP Photo/European Southern Observatory/Digitized Sky Survey 2)
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