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Newly Formed Solar System

Posted by Zonk on from the dubbed-mordor dept.

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..."

3 of 117 comments (clear)

  1. My favorite ring-related heavenly body: by Humorously_Inept · · Score: 4, Interesting

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

    --

    ~Someday, I hope to be an aspiring author.
  2. More Info by kf6auf · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

  3. Re:I wonder if they have any telephone poles by Captain+Nitpick · · Score: 3, Interesting
    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).

    --
    But then again, I could be wrong.