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Posted on 02/04/2026 10:28:40 AM PST by SunkenCiv
Scientists watching the nearby Fomalhaut star system have directly seen two protoplanets smash together for the first time. Then, they saw it happen again...
The Fomalhaut system is no stranger to such crashes. It's famously known as the "Eye of Sauron" due to its resemblance to the fiery, all-seeing eye from J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of The Rings franchise. The likeness comes from the spectacular dust belt that surrounds Fomalhaut at a distance of 133 astronomical units (AU), with one AU being equal to 93 million miles (150 million km) — the average distance between the sun and Earth.
(Excerpt) Read more at livescience.com ...
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This composite Hubble Space Telescope image shows the debris ring around the star Fomalhaut, along with the bright dust clouds cs1 and cs2. For comparison, dust cloud cs1, imaged in 2012, is pictured with dust cloud cs2, imaged in 2023.Image credit: NASA, ESA, Paul Kalas (UC Berkeley)
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Another effect of Climate Change. Primal scream therapy might work to fix the catastrophe.
OK, but what’s big black circle and star doing in the middle of the photo?
It’s a space pastie.
Notwithstanding posterchild’s wry observation, the thing in the center is to block the overwhelming light from the central star so that the outer stuff of interest can be seen without glare and saturation of the sensor. The same thing is done with our Sun to see flares and so on.
I like that name much better than "occulting disk" or "occulter disk", as used in a coronagraph.
I hope you don't mind if I steal it. :-)
I would prefer a giant space pasty. One with rutabaga. That would be a lot better.
If you got to the stripper planet you find out about that!
Dang! I thought I heard a loud crash...
Now I know what it was...
I think that star is Chuck Norris Texas Ranger.
Please steal freely.
25 light years distance seems in the imaginable realm, as opposed to the unimaginable realm of a million light years or more away.
That the cs1 & cs2 events happened in the last third of my lifetime makes them seem relevant in a way that viewing something from a billion years ago does not.
I read that 60-some years ago. Don’t remember a thing, other than I liked it.
space pastry?
25 light years away? So this actually happened in 2001. Somewhere, Arthur C. Clarke is laughing.
Published in 1974. It was a good story for its time.
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