Illustration of the HD 15407A System Based on Observations from AKARI and Spitzer, showing the dusty quartz disk orbiting the star. (Credit: Univ. of Tokyo and NAOJ.)
Posted on 05/20/2012 8:19:33 PM PDT by SunkenCiv
Based on observations with the AKARI and Spitzer infrared space telescopes, this recently discovered, intriguing feature of a stellar system may open new doors for research on the mineralogical nature of extrasolar planetary systems...
The team of scientists led by Dr. Fujiwara conducted research exploring this new frontier and concentrated their efforts on finding debris disks that could indicate planet formation.
According to a widely accepted recent scenario of planet formation, rocky planets like the Earth begin as an aggregation of cosmic dust and then continued their development as an accumulation of planetesimals, rocky planetary building blocks, around young stars.
A substantial amount of dust would be generated from the collisions of planetesimals around main-sequence stars in the later phase of the planet formation process...
The team discovered that the sun-like star HD 15407A, located in the Constellation Perseus 180 light years away from Earth, emits very bright infrared light relative to its visible light... Since HD 15407A is a main-sequence star, active collisions of planetesimals around it could produce a large amount of dust and emit infrared light...
Their examination of the Spitzer spectrum of HD 15407A revealed that at least 100 trillion tons of tiny particles of quartz dust orbit the star.
They also found that the dust is located about 1 AU (astronomical unit) from the central star in the so-called "terrestrial planet region." ...
Quartz dust seems to be a rather rare kind of dust in the Universe, and it is not yet clear how the quartz dust observed around HD 15407A formed.
Since the Earth's crust contains a large amount of quartz-like minerals, this suggests that the quartz dust around HD 15407A might come from the surface layers of large rocky bodies colliding with other planetesimals orbiting the star.
(Excerpt) Read more at spacedaily.com ...
Illustration of the HD 15407A System Based on Observations from AKARI and Spitzer, showing the dusty quartz disk orbiting the star. (Credit: Univ. of Tokyo and NAOJ.)
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When did Subaru branch out from making cars for lesbians into astronomy?
It’s a typo, that’s supposed to be Sue Baru. Of course, she’s a lesbian too...
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