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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..."
Ours was invented first! We own the patent! You think inventing a solar system is easy? Trivial and non-obvious? Then why haven't you created one yourself?
Prior art? I can't seeeeeeee you! Can you show that your solar system was invented before our solar system was?
Yeah, I thought so.
All your solar system are belong to us. Uh huh. Don't waste your time crying cause I can't hear the tears. All those heavenly bodies? Time for me to get jiggy with each and every one! I got my pulsar right here!
My IP is bigger than your IP!
(and to think Bozo patents the "click" and Jobs patents the "wheel". I mean, c'mon guys, keep up. I'm talking planets here! What do you got? A forest and a fruit? -1, I'm-Not-Interested-Anymore.)
I'd say it's at least 25 years old. Pfft.
You need to speed up your R&D cycle to compete in today's market, Mr. astronomer guys.
Of course it runs NetBSD. BTC: 1NT7QvbetmANwaMzhpVL6
Good luck getting the ring to that Mount Doom...
Don't trust any concentration of power.
I wonder if that would be a good spot to post my flyer:
**Missing!**
One solar sail. Shiny silver, 10 stories tall, 5 microns wide. Lost near the Sol area, but may be near Formalhaut in about 500 years. Answers to "401.525 MHz". Very dear to our hearts; reward offered.If sighted, please contact the Planetary Society at 626-793-5100.
What a crazy random happenstance!
Come on, even Slashdot is usually better at reporting news that's RECENT! I mean, how can you call something that formed 25 years ago _news_? Bah!
What if the Earth is some kind of Art Planet, and what we do here really is copied "out there", or at least observed and acted upon, in the same way as in Galaxy Quest.
Lets face it, that sure does look like the Eye Of Sauron and it sure wasn't discovered before a couple of million beings on Planet Earth saw the movie and started dreaming about it or whatever.
a LOTR solar system? What's next, the Star Wars solar system? Oh wait, my bad, that was a long, long time ago.
The discoverers knew the ring-like object was there beforehand. It was observed in infrared light first. What is unprecedented is the clarity of the feature in visual light and accurate knowledge of its geometry (the center of the ring (ellipse) isn't exactly coincident with the central star, which implies some other gravitating object is present).
If the presence of a planetary system weren't suspected, I doubt they would have gotten orbits to use the HST to observe this.
As for the "newly formed" stuff, it has nothing to do with the Hubble picture. It merely is a speculation based on the fact that the star is A-type star (like Vega) that hadn't evolved too much (I don't remember how old, but it's nowhere near as old as the Sun...) Anyway, add the word "astronomically" in front of "newly formed" to make a better sense out of the phrase.
Oddly enough, from the Earth's vantage point, the ring also happens to resemble The Eye of Sauron.
Actually, the black pupil isn't really there, it's just the Hubble's coronagraph (see TFA). So, while the picture indeed resembles the Eye of Sauron, the system doesn't really look like this seen from Earth.
Go here:
STScI Press Release
Click on the top image, then scroll down to find unannotated version of images and click on it. Then you'll find a big TIFF file of this picture.
Enjoy.
Hoag's Object. So unusual they call it an object!
~Someday, I hope to be an aspiring author.
Lovecraft claimed that some of the Great Old Ones lived on or near Fomalhaut. Maybe it is not the eye of Sauron, but something far worse.
And now that we can see it, it can see us. And it will come for us in our dreams. And lick the sweet icor from our brains.
Enya! Enya! Cthulhu fthagan!
"Trademarks are the heraldry of the new feudalism."
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.