Posted on 08/10/2009 6:39:12 PM PDT by Red in Blue PA
Two distant planets orbiting a young star apparently smashed into each other at high speeds thousands of years ago in cosmic pileup of cataclysmic proportions, astronomers announced Monday.
Telltale plumes of vaporized rock and lava leftover from the collision revealed its existence to NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope, which picked up signatures from the impact in recent observations.
The two-planet pileup occurred within the last few thousand years or so - a relatively recent cosmic timeframe. The smaller of the two bodies - a planet about the size of Earth's moon, according to computer models - was apparently destroyed by the crash. The other was most likely a Mercury-sized-planet and survived, albeit severely dented.
"This collision had to be huge and incredibly high-speed for rock to have been vaporized and melted," said Carey Lisse of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Maryland, lead author of a paper describing the findings in the Aug. 20 issue of the Astrophysical Journal.
Researchers believe the planets were moving at about 22,400 mph (10 kilometers per second) before the crash. The violent wreck released amorphous silica rock, or melted glass, and hardened chunks of lava called tektites. Spitzer also spotted large clouds of orbiting silicon monoxide gas created when the rock was vaporized.
(Excerpt) Read more at foxnews.com ...
I wonder of the debris will be harmful to Superman...?
I wonder if the debris will be harmful to Superman...?
Anyone seen Michael Moore lately?
This will have a devastating effect on the poor.
The distance from Earth and the energy involved in such a collision is truly mindboggling.
I hope they had insurance.
What star system?
I saw a program that explained how this happened to the Earth. As a result, the core of the Earth was shot out and eventually became the moon. Amazing stuff.
What, no pictures of this happening? Sucks.
I was expecting world shattering pics, too!
One of them was probably busy "texting".
Women and minorities hardest hit.
Bush’s fault.
We all know this is Bush’s fault!!!!
we.are.so.scroooooood.
"Infrared detectors on Spitzer found the traces of rocky rubble and re-frozen lava around a young star, called HD 172555, still in the early stages of planet formation. The system is about 100 light-years from Earth. One light-year is the distance light travels in a year (about six trillion miles).
A similar fender-bender is thought to have formed Earth's moon more than 4 billion years ago, when a body the size of Mars rammed into Earth.
"The collision that formed our moon would have been tremendous, enough to melt the surface of Earth," said co-author Geoff Bryden of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California. "Debris from the collision most likely settled into a disk around Earth that eventually coalesced to make the moon. This is about the same scale of impact we're seeing with Spitzer - we don't know if a moon will form or not, but we know a large rocky body's surface was red hot, warped and melted." In fact, such violent encounters seem to have been common in our own solar system's early history. For example, giant impacts are thought to have stripped Mercury of its outer crust, tipped Uranus on its side, and spun Venus backward.
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,538815,00.html?test=latestnews
Great books. Great movie.
How ‘bout this one:
You might want to check the date on the link!
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,761815,00.html
THE HOPKINS MANUSCRIPT — R. C. Sherriff—Macmillan ($2.50).
While gathering brushwood for a fire to keep off the packs of wild dogs that roam the former site of London, an archeologist of the Royal Society of Abyssinia found an ancient, 20th-century thermos bottle. In the bottle was the Hopkins Manuscript. Since the damp climate of the British Isles rotted all books and papers, practically the only other records of the white man’s glory known to the vigorous civilizations of the East were a rusty iron tablet (when deciphered, it read: Keep Off the Grass) and an oblong stone (it was believed to read: Peckham 3 miles).
In the small, smug thoughts and words of Edgar Hopkins (poultry breeder and amateur astronomer), Ex-Insurance Clerk Robert Cedric Sherriff (Journey’s End, St. Helena) gives an insect’s-eye view of what happened when the moon got out of whack in 1945, plunged into the Atlantic Ocean, all but wiped out Europe by tornado, earthquake and flood. The moon’s havoc was less than the human havoc which followed. England, now changed from an island to a landlocked meadow on the fringe of Europe, demanded a “British Corridor” to the sea at Gibraltar, but the Corridor blocked Europe’s nations from the oil and metals discovered on the fallen moon. In the wars that resulted, the Asiatic peoples revolted and completed the moon’s work.
Off to the comparative safety of London with its 700 inhabitants moved Survivor Hopkins to chronicle his sad saga by the light of a piece of string pushed through a strip of bacon. At night he wrote, by day he hunted for food in the barren city. His sole neighbor, an old lady, lived in the National Gallery. “She heard that it was empty, and wanted to gratify her love of art and lust for possession during the last days that remain to her.” She lived on pigeons that fell dead from the Nelson Column, cooking them over a fire of Dutch masterpieces, which she disiked.
Told in Edgar Hopkins’ subdued commuter’s style, this demi-Wellsian Downfall of the West packs a clammy warning.
parsy, for whom this was one of the first sci fi books he ever read.
That looks like something I pass when I’m not regular.
Hmmmm. I thought I heard something go “bump” outside...
A tree fell in the forest.
Where's the Kaboom? There was supposed to be an Earth shattering Kaboom!
Someday humans might be living in that solar system.
LOL
Now that's what I call "global warming"... none of that one degree stuff they envirokooks have everyone afraid of...
Only a few thousand years ago? That must be the shallow end of deep space. Relatively speaking (npi), isn’t that like in the back yard?
My reaction is a Bart Simpson-voiced “Cool!”
>Only a few thousand years ago?
>That must be the shallow end of deep space.
>Relatively speaking (npi),
>isn’t that like in the back yard?
The planets and their star are only about a hundred light-years away, not a few thousand. A ‘few thousand’ is the AGE of the event (in years).
“Infrared detectors on Spitzer found the traces of rocky rubble and re-frozen lava around a young star, called HD 172555, still in the early stages of planet formation. The system is about 100 light-years from Earth. One light-year is the distance light travels in a year (about six trillion miles).
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,538815,00.html?test=latestnews
“The two-planet pileup occurred within the last few thousand years or so...”
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,538815,00.html?test=latestnews
Hope it wasn’t too close to Deep Space Nine....that could cause some damage to the space station..
The wording was a little tricky and I thought you might have thought that, since we were just now receiving the images of the thousands-of-years-old collision (via light speed) that the event must have taken place a few thousand years ago.
RE: The wording was a little tricky and I thought you might have thought that, since we were just now receiving the images of the thousands-of-years-old collision (via light speed) that the event must have taken place a few thousand years ago.
Correction: that the event was a few thousand light-years away. Sorry.
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Whoops.
And it backed up rush hour traffic for hours.
I hope they were wearing their seatbelts.
This ping would have been more appreciated a few thousand years ago so I could have prepared!
I don’t even have camera batteries.
NO more calls, please.
We have a winner!
"Two distant planets orbiting a young star apparently smashed into each other at high speeds... revealed its existence to NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope..."
-PJ
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