Newly Formed Solar System

xPsi writes "An article in New Scientist reports that a team of astronomers from UC Berkeley and NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center have used the Hubble space telescope to image a dust ring in orbit around Fomalhaut, a nearby star about 25 light years away. The ring 'offers the best evidence yet that a nearby star is circled by a newly formed solar system.' Oddly enough, from the Earth's vantage point, the ring also happens to resemble The Eye of Sauron. One Ring to rule them all, one Ring to find them..."

Comments

How Long?

[Anonymous Coward]

Does anyone know if this is something they were tracking, or did someone just chance upon it and determine it was "newly formed"?

Yes, I did read the article.

It would be rather interesting if they've been tracking it. Less interesting if they just chanced upon it.

And FINALLY -- a *positive* story about the Hubble telescope.

My favorite ring-related heavenly body:

[Humorously_Inept]

Hoag's Object. So unusual they call it an object!

Re:I wonder if they have any telephone poles

[ImaLamer]

I know you are going for humor, but why not leave now?

It's only 25 light years away. If solar sails can be asumed to go "a significant fraction" of light speed (at their best) we can assume that it would take no longer than a few minutes - to the passengers (assuming that a trip of 100,000 light years would take about 3 minutes "to the riders").

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light_year
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_dilation

This means a two-way trip to "snap photos" would mean that your loved ones may have passed, but you are theorically only about 50-100 years into the future. TFA mentions the amount of learning that could be had - if we left in the next 100 years we would learn even more, but this solar system is still young. Even sending instruments to beam back data would be worth it.

Sure, there are a lot of things to work out - but it is something to shoot for. And a whole lot more worth it than going for Mars or the Moon again.

only one of them, right?

[adrianmonk]

Maybe I'm just being nitpicky, but I thought the Sun (proper noun) was a star (common noun), and that Sol (also proper noun) was another word for the Sun, and that therefore the Solar System (also proper noun) specifically refers to the Sun and the planets surrounding it, not to any other star systems.

So, saying "Newly Formed Solar System" makes no sense, because there is only one Solar System, and we are in it right now, and it is not newly formed. It makes about as much sense to call something else a Solar System as it would if we discovered another continent and the headline were "New North America Found" instead of "New Continent Found".

More Info

[kf6auf]

This dust cloud was first published in 1989 in the Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society.

According to "The Age of Gliese 879 and Fomalhaut" in APJ v.475, p.313 (1997) Fomalhaut is 200 +/- 100 million years old. While this is a large margin of error, this still confirms that circumstellar dust disks can persist in A stars for several hundred megayears, which it is believed can then form planets.

According to Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society v.334, p.589 (2002) it is estimated that the ring has the mass of 20-30 Earths.

While not known for certain "Submillimeter Observations of an Asymmetric Dust Disk around Fomalhaut" in APJ v.582, p.1141-46 (2003) implies that the ring offset and the clump with 5% the mass of the ring is likely caused by a large planet close to the star, but I don't know what this no-visible-planet observation means for that theory. Dark matter?

And I could not for the life of me find the distance that ring is from Fomalhaut. Anyone know?

And thanks for that link to the Eye of Sauron, I had been wondering what that was.

Re:I wonder if they have any telephone poles

[Captain Nitpick]

It's only 25 light years away. If solar sails can be asumed to go "a significant fraction" of light speed (at their best) we can assume that it would take no longer than a few minutes - to the passengers (assuming that a trip of 100,000 light years would take about 3 minutes "to the riders").

You've forgotten about acceleration. Accelerating to 99.9% of light speed (relative to the Sun) in 90 seconds would require an acceleration of about 340,000g. Solar sails don't have that kind of thrust, and you couldn't build a ship or crew to survive it anyway.

(Note that I've done the math using newtonian equations. With relativistic effects the number is bound to be much worse).