Latest Debris disk Stories
redOrbit Staff & Wire Reports – Your Universe Online According to newly released images from the Hubble Space Telescope, a vast debris belt circling around a nearby star is wider than scientists believe, and the unusual orbit of a planet traveling around that star could be to blame. In a statement released Tuesday, NASA officials stated that the images reveal that the debris disk traveling around the star Fomalhaut actually spans from 14 to 20 billion miles from the star – much...
WASHINGTON, Jan. 8, 2013 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Newly released NASA Hubble Space Telescope images of a vast debris disk encircling the nearby star Fomalhaut and a mysterious planet circling it may provide forensic evidence of a titanic planetary disruption in the system. (Logo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20081007/38461LOGO ) Astronomers are surprised to find the debris belt is wider than previously known, spanning a section of space from 14 to nearly 20 billion miles...
April Flowers for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online A new study, using the capabilities of the Subaru Telescope, has captured a clear image of the protoplanetary disk of the star UX Tau A. An international team of researchers from the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan (NAOJ) and the Japanese universities of Kobe, Hyogo, and Saitama released a detailed study of the disk's characteristics, suggesting that its dust particles are large in size and non-spherical in shape. The...
Dr. John Millis and Jedidiah Becker for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online In 2008, astronomers announced that the Hubble Space Telescope had captured images of an alien planet orbiting the nearby star Fomalhaut, located a mere 25 light years away in the constellation Piscis Austrinus. Dubbed Fomalhaut b and claimed as the first exoplanet to be confirmed through direct imaging in visible light, the planet appeared to orbit its star immersed in a massive ring of dust and debris. In...
April Flowers for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online European Space Agency's (ESA) Herschel Space Observatory has discovered pristine material that matches comets in our own Solar System in a dust belt around the young star Beta Pictoris. Beta Pictoris is 12 million years old, and resides a short 63 light-years from Earth. A gas giant planet and a dusty debris disc that has the potential to evolve into a torus of icy bodies like those of the Kuiper Belt found outside the orbit of...
Lawrence LeBlond for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online Despite seventy percent of the Earth’s surface being covered by water, in reality the whole of the planet is only made up of 1 percent water, making it relatively dry compared to the gas giants, such as Jupiter and Neptune. And now, that dryness, which has long perplexed scientists, has been explained by a team of scientists working at the Space Telescope Science Institute (STSI) in Baltimore, Maryland. The standard model...
The ESA’s Herschel Space Observatory has been studying the dust near the star Fomalhaut and has found the surrounding dust appears to have come from the dust of destroyed comets. A young star, Fomalhaut is estimated to be just a few million years old and twice as large as the sun. The dust belt near the star was discovered in the 1980s by the Infrared Astronomical Satellite (IRAS). Herschel's imaging technology and capabilities are able to capture a clearer picture of this dust belt,...
Astronomers of the University Jena find a stardust belt in extra-solar planetary systems The debris discs are remnants of the formation of the planets. "We are dealing with enormous accumulations of chunks of matter which create dust when they collide", Alexander Krivov says. This dust is of greatest importance for the astronomers, because it helps to draw conclusions about the planet formation. There are even two debris discs in our solar system, the asteroid belt and the Kuiper belt...
New supercomputer simulations tracking the interactions of thousands of dust grains show what the solar system might look like to alien astronomers searching for planets. The models also provide a glimpse of how this view might have changed as our planetary system matured."The planets may be too dim to detect directly, but aliens studying the solar system could easily determine the presence of Neptune -- its gravity carves a little gap in the dust," said Marc Kuchner, an...
GREENBELT, Md., Sept. 23 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- New supercomputer simulations tracking the interactions of thousands of dust grains show what the solar system might look like to alien astronomers searching for planets. The models also provide a glimpse of how this view might have changed as our planetary system matured. (Logo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20081007/38461LOGO) (Logo: http://www.newscom.com/cgi-bin/prnh/20081007/38461LOGO) "The planets may be too dim to detect...
