Some stars have it tough when it comes to raising planets. A new image from NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope shows one unlucky lot of stars, born into a dangerous neighborhood. The stars themselves are safe, but the material surrounding them — the dusty bits of what might have been future planets — can be seen blowing off into space.

The hazard in this particular nook of space is a group of behemoth stars. Radiation and winds from the massive stars are wiping smaller, sun-like stars clean of their planet-making material.

“We are seeing the effects that massive stars have on smaller stars that are trying to form planets,” said Xavier Koenig, lead author of a paper about the discovery, recently published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters. “These stars may or may not go on to form small, inner planets like the Earth, but it’s probable that outer planets like Uranus and Neptune would never come to be.”

Many stars and planets do in fact grow up and survive the harsh environments of massive stars. Some astronomers say our middle-aged sun, though now sitting in a tranquil patch of space, once resided in a raucous, massive star-forming cloud. Over time, stars in these turbulent regions disperse and spread out, spending their later years in relative solitude.

The new Spitzer observations illustrate just how nasty these massive star-forming regions can be. It shows a portion of an active star-forming nebula called W5, located about 6,500 light-years away in the constellation Cassiopeia. Radiation and winds from a hub of four stars, each about 20 times as massive as our sun, are stripping the planet-forming material right off of three young, sun-like stars about one light-year away.

The sun-like stars are about two to three million years old — the age when stars are thought to begin forming planets out of disks of gas and dust that swirl around them. The dust from these disks is visible in the Spitzer image as comet-like tails pointing away from the destructive massive stars.

Spitzer, an infrared observatory, can see this dust from the disks because the dust is warm and glows with infrared light. Since the telescope was launched more than five years ago, it has identified a handful of disks being blown from their stars.

“On astronomical timescales, these events are probably fairly short-lived,” said Koenig. “It probably takes about one million years for the disks to completely disappear.”

Koenig said that the dust being swiped away is from the outer portion of the stars’ planet-forming disks — around where Uranus and Neptune would orbit in our solar system and beyond. That means it’s possible that any baby Earths forming in these faraway systems would grow up safely. Outer planets, on the other hand, might be nothing more than dust in the wind.

NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., manages the Spitzer Space Telescope mission for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, Washington. Science operations are conducted at the Spitzer Science Center at the California Institute of Technology, also in Pasadena. Caltech manages JPL for NASA. The multiband imaging photometer for Spitzer, which made the new observations, was built by Ball Aerospace Corporation, Boulder, Colo., and the University of Arizona, Tucson. Its principal investigator is George Rieke of the University of Arizona.

NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope has observed a planet that heats up to red-hot temperatures in a matter of hours before quickly cooling back down.

The “hot-headed” planet is HD 80606b, a gas giant that orbits a star 190 light-years from Earth. It was already known to be quite unusual, with an orbit shuttling it nearly as far out as Earth is from our sun, and much closer in than our planet Mercury. Astronomers used Spitzer, an infrared observatory, to measure heat emanating from the planet as it whipped behind and close to its star. In just six hours, the planet’s temperature rose from 800 to 1,500 Kelvin (980 to 2,240 degrees Fahrenheit).

“We watched the development of one of the fiercest storms in the galaxy,” said astronomer Greg Laughlin of the Lick Observatory, University of California at Santa Cruz. “This is the first time that we’ve detected weather changes in real time on a planet outside our solar system.” Laughlin is lead author of a new report about the discovery appearing in the Jan. 29 issue of Nature.

HD 80606b was originally discovered in 2001 by a Swiss planet-hunting team led by Dominique Naef of the Geneva Observatory in Switzerland. Using a method known as the Doppler-velocity technique, the astronomers learned that the planet is wildly eccentric, with an orbit more like a comet’s than a planet’s. HD 80606b’s orbit takes it as far out as 0.85 astronomical units from its star, and as close in as 0.03 astronomical units (one astronomical unit is the distance between Earth and the sun).

The planet takes about 111 days to circle its star, but it spends most of its time at farther distances while zipping through the closest part of its orbit in less than a day. (This is a consequence of Kepler’s Second Law of Planetary Motion, which states that orbiting bodies — planets and comets — sweep out an equal area in equal time.)

“If you could float above the clouds of this planet, you’d see its sun growing larger and larger at faster and faster rates, increasing in brightness by almost a factor of 1,000,” said Laughlin.

Spitzer observed HD 80606b before, during and just after its closest passage to the star in November of 2007, as the planet sizzled under the star’s heat. When Laughlin and his colleagues planned the observation, they did not know whether the planet would disappear completely behind the star, an event called a secondary eclipse, or whether it would remain in view. Luckily for the team, the planet did indeed temporarily disappear from view, providing the planet’s initial and final temperatures (had the planet had not been eclipsed, the team would have known only the temperature change without knowing the starting point).

The extreme temperature swing observed by Spitzer indicates that the air near the planet’s gaseous surface must quickly absorb and lose heat. This type of atmospheric information revealing how a planet responds to sudden changes in heating — an extreme version of seasonal change — had never been obtained before for any exoplanet (a planet orbiting another star).

“By studying this planet under such extreme circumstances, we figure out how it handles heat — does it retain it or dissipate it? In this case, the answer is that the planet releases the heat right away,” said Laughlin. “We were essentially able to perform the ‘thought experiment’ — what would happen to a planet like Jupiter if we could drag it very close to the sun?”

Laughlin and his colleagues say that a key factor in being able to make the observations is the planet’s eccentric orbit. Unlike so-called hot Jupiter planets that remain in tight orbits around their stars, HD 80606b rotates around its axis roughly every 34 hours. Hot Jupiters, on the other hand, are thought to be tidally locked like our moon, so one side always faces their stars. Because HD 80606b spins on its axis many times per orbit, the astronomers were able to measure how its atmosphere responds to being baked by the star.

“The planet is spinning at a fast enough rate for the planet’s hot spot to come into view,” said co-author Drake Deming of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md. “The hot spot can’t hide.”

Amateur and professional astronomers alike are gearing up to observe HD 80606b this coming Valentine’s Day, when it will swing around the front of its star. There’s a 15 percent chance that the planet will eclipse its star, an event known as the primary transit. If so, the event would not only be remarkable to see, but would also provide more details about the nature of this temperamental world.

Other authors include Jonathan Langton, Daniel Kasen, Steve Vogt, Eugenio Rivera and Stefano Meschiari from the University of California, Santa Cruz, and Paul Butler of the Carnegie Institution’s Department of Terrestrial Magnetism, Washington. NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., manages the Spitzer Space Telescope mission for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, Washington. Science operations are conducted at the Spitzer Science Center at the California Institute of Technology, also in Pasadena. Caltech manages JPL for NASA.

Unlike previous versions of IE (mostly IE 6.0 and 7.0), where IE was configured to only allow up to two simultaneous file downloads, Windows Internet Explorer 8 limits the number of files that you can download at one time to six.

However, if you need to increase this number, you must make a registry modification. The path is not the same as it was in IE 6.0 and IE 7.0, so please take care before making any change to the registry.

Please carefully read the following warning:

Warning!

This document contains instructions for editing the registry. If you make any error while editing the registry, you can potentially cause Windows to fail or be unable to boot, requiring you to reinstall Windows. Edit the registry at your own risk. Always back up the registry before making any changes. If you do not feel comfortable editing the registry, do not attempt these instructions. Instead, seek the help of a trained computer specialist.

To do so, follow the next steps:

1. Start Registry Editor.

2. Locate the following key in the registry:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\MAIN\FeatureControl\FEATURE_MAXCONNECTIONSPERSERVER

3. If it doesn’t exist, on the Edit menu, point to New, click DWORD Value, and then add the following registry values:

Value name: iexplore.exe

Value data: 10

Base: Decimal

Note: By setting the value to 10, you increase the connection limit to 10.

4. Locate the following key in the registry:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\MAIN\FeatureControl\FEATURE_MAXCONNECTIONSPER1_0SERVER

5. If it doesn’t exist, on the Edit menu, point to New, click DWORD Value, and then add the following registry values:

Value name: iexplore.exe

Value data: 10

Base: Decimal

Note: Again, by setting the value to 10, you increase the connection limit to 10.

6. Exit Registry Editor.

Internet Explorer 8 should now be able to download up to 10 simultaneous files.