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
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
