After a star is born, a disk of leftover gas and dust swirls around it and provides the seeds of planet formation. The details of the process are hidden in the dust. With the right techniques, however, the story unfolds.

"Dust is only about 1 percent of the material in a cloud that goes into forming a star, and only about 1 percent of the mass of a protoplanetary disk," Jayawardhana explained in an interview. "But it's much easier to see than gas, which is the other 99 percent."

Dust reflects and scatters visible light from the star. Viewed in an optical telescope, a diffuse blob is seen, representing the outer reaches of the stuff. Yet dust also absorbs light and is heated to something like minus 238 degrees Fahrenheit (-150 C).

"Pretty cold by our standards," Jayawardhana says. "But warm compared to empty space."

Researchers can examine this warmth, and see right inside a dust disk, by monitoring infrared radiation that is re-emitted by the dust grains. It's the same technique that allows night-vision goggles to spot a warm enemy on a cold battleground.

"Sometimes grains will stick together to make fluffy things," Jayawardhana says. "And around that maybe you'll have gaseous deposits. As they grow bigger you basically get little asteroids or comets, or what we call planetesimals. When they become big enough, they form the core of a planet."

Small cores tend to form rocky planets. Larger cores can become Jupiter-like planets, which end up being mostly gas.

Glimpses inside other fledgling solar systems hint that there's more to it, however. "It looks like the story is that it's not a simple linear thing, but that there might be a diversity of processes going on and also a diversity of outcomes," Jayawardhana says.

Some 80 extrasolar planets already found around several stars hint as much.

All of the known exoplanets, as they are called, are huge, typically many times the mass of Jupiter. They tend to orbit very close to their host stars, often closer than Mercury is to our Sun. Life as we know it probably cannot survive these environments, experts say. And smaller, Earth-like planets could never form in the gravitational shadow of the behemoths.

These are just the systems we know about, however. Only large planets are found because, well, because they are easy to find. They've all been detected by observing a wobble in their stars, caused by the gravity of the planet. Better technology is needed to find smaller planets and to find large planets farther from their stars.

In a somewhat sneaky approach, infrared astronomers expect to overcome this limitation fairly soon by focusing not on fully formed, mature planets, but on newborns still enshrouded in dusty cocoons, still contracting and -- importantly -- shining brightly by their own heat.

Jayawardhana is hunting for a young twin of Jupiter, a planet similar in size and distance from a star, yet still in its infancy. He expects to photograph it.

There's almost no question that it will happen within a decade, Jayawardhana said. He's already got candidates, which he coyly won't talk about. The discovery could very well come within two years, he said. It's mostly a matter of picking the right target.

"It's already technically possible," he said. "We just have to get lucky."