CRASH CREATION? Collisions of asteroids, as in this artist's depiction, might have created the warm dust in the belt around the nearby star Zeta Leporis. -- J. Lomberg/Gemini Observatory
Posted on 01/07/2007 8:37:35 PM PST by SunkenCiv
The new measurements pinpoint the location of a disk of warm dust that surrounds Zeta Leporis. The dust lies about the same distance from the star as the solar system's asteroid belt lies from the sun, Margaret M. Moerchen and Charles M. Telesco of the University of Florida in Gainesville and their colleagues report in an upcoming Astrophysical Journal Letters... The close-in dust around Zeta Leporis probably arose when several asteroids bumped into each other, grinding rock into a fine spray of particles, or when a large asteroid, perhaps 100 kilometers in diameter, suffered a cataclysmic wallop, Moerchen and Telesco say... In 2001, Christine Chen and Michael Jura of the University of California... found that the dust is probably confined to a disk with a radius no larger than 6.1 astronomical units (AU)... (SN: 6/16/01, p. 375). In February 2005, the team led by Moerchen and Telesco... [found] that most of the dust is concentrated at a distance of 3 AU from Zeta Leporis. That's similar to the location of the solar system's asteroid belt, which stretches between 2.1 and 3.3 AU from the sun... Moerchen's team is planning further observations to reveal the Zeta Leporis disk's shape. If it's circular and uniform in density, the disk probably formed by the slow grinding of asteroids over thousands of years. A more distorted shape would suggest that the dust was generated by a collision between two large chunks of rock only about 100 years ago, Telesco says. "For years we've been studying Kuiper belt–like disks; now, we're investigating the architecture of the inner asteroidal regions" around stars. "This is kind of new territory," Telesco says.
(Excerpt) Read more at sciencenews.org ...
CRASH CREATION? Collisions of asteroids, as in this artist's depiction, might have created the warm dust in the belt around the nearby star Zeta Leporis. -- J. Lomberg/Gemini Observatory
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-bloggers/1607979/posts?page=126#126
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-bloggers/1646385/posts?page=46#46
related:
Spitzer Sees the Aftermath of a Planetary Collision
Universe Today | Jan. 10, 2005 | Dolores Beasley and Gay Yee Hill
Posted on 01/13/2005 11:50:18 PM EST by SunkenCiv
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/1320521/posts
That is a mere 560 million miles -- or so.
(artist's conception, probably of the Solar System, from Persian Journal)
Asteroid Belt Like Ours Spotted Around Another StarThe scientists have not actually seen any asteroids around Zeta Leporis, a young star twice as massive as the Sun and 60 to 70 light-years away. Instead they have studied the temperature and position of the star's swirling mass of debris, which they say shows evidence of chaotic collisions among rocks that creates the dust needed to sustain such a disk... Zeta Leporis, also called HR 1998, is between 50 million and 400 million years old, compared to our middle-aged Sun, which is about 4.5 billion years old. Along with some other young stars, it was found in the 1980s to have a ring of dusty debris. And in 1991 astronomers learned that this debris ring was unusually warm and close to its parent star, unlike other disks that are farther out, and hence colder. This dust, given its known properties, should spiral into a star within 20,000 years, according to current theories of physics and star formation, scientists say. But this star is much older.
by Robert Roy Britt
4 June 2001
Yup... Cohen notes that the distance is similar to that of Jupiter's from the Sun.
Doesn't that artist's conception have the galaxy perpendicular to the solar ecliptic?
Looks like it, but then, that's how the Solar System is.
"Crossing the Milky Way at the constellation Scorpio is the ecliptic, the apparent path of the sun, moon, and planets as they move against the background of stars."
http://www.windows.ucar.edu/tour/link=/mythology/Maya_Milkyway.html&edu=high
Dang! You're telling me that Uranus is the only planet spinning along with the rest of the Galaxy, and all the rest of us are axis-over-teakettles the other way?
Well, Go-o-o-olly! That shore does explain a lot!
Not only that:
Two more rings discovered around Uranus
MSNBC/AP | Dec. 22nd
Posted on 12/22/2005 2:55:15 PM EST by iPod Shuffle
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/1545558/posts
What I get for living too close to the NSA.
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