
1 day
is all it takes (or so say creationists)
I bet they'll find a way to make this finding work for their cause...
Boffins were bewildered when a star's dust belt mysteriously disappeared, but they now think that the vanishing fragments could have used up in some superfast planet formation. Artist's impression of dusty TYC 8241 2652 1 TYC in its formerly dusty state. Credit: Gemini Observatory/AURA artwork by Lynette Cook Researchers …
is it just me or do some "scientists" seem to completely dismiss obvious and simple ideas for the most far fetched ones?
dust around stars disappears! must be super duper fast planet formation!!!
or maybe just a migratory planet(oid)s orbit caused it to drift through the solar plane which contained the dust causing a large portion of it to be scooped up to the planet(oid)s surface due to gravity, something we can infer from accumulated evidence happened many times in our own solar system setting a known precident.
NO!! MUST!! BE!! SUPERFAST!! PLANET!! FORMATION!! MUST!! HAVE!! CRAZY!! THEORY!! TO!! GET!! MORE!! FUNDING!!
1) The planet would have had to be effing huge to scoop up all the dust across that solar system
2) It would have to "drift" awfully fast to get in and hoover everything up in such a short period of time
3) Have we really inferred that many planets drifted through our solar system scooping up dust? When did we do that then?
"is it just me or do some "scientists" seem to completely dismiss obvious and simple ideas for the most far fetched ones?"
How about we look at the evidence and research done on TYC before we start introducing maybe extras like unseen migratory planets? Maybe the reason that they don't suspect the obvious and simple idea of a migratory planet, because there wasn't one there to see, .
tl;dr
It's you.
It was the Magratheans who constructed the planet-sized computer named Earth (for a race of hyper-intelligent pan-dimensional beings, the mice) to determine the ultimate question of Life, the Universe, and Everything, which is required to understand the Answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything.
I wonder what they have built now? I bet it's not another Earth.
This post has been deleted by its author
You up there in your ivory tower, I don't understand. What do you mean the dust belt has "disappeared"? What the hell is a "disappearing?". That's such a long word and I have no clue what it means. It sounds very complicated. Could you perhaps provide us with a simple real world example of what "disappearing" entails?
""It's like the classic magician's trick: Now you see it, now you don't," lead author Carl Melis, a postdoc at UC San Diego, said."
Ah thanks, I think I understand now.
That was my thought too. Not sure if it's possible in this case though, and I don't have a clue about astrophysics so don't know the answer.
Could our have solar system rotated around this other one quite so quickly (or more likely the other solar system/dust ring rotating)? Even a 1 degree change in angle within a year sounds sounds far too quick to me, but is it possible?
Two years is about one orbit for Mars (1.88 years) so that dust would have to be very close the the star for there to be any chance a new planet could suck up all/most of the dust in that short a time since it would also be in orbit around the star.
The earth moon system was created when a mars sized planetoid hit earth, the dust cloud this collision caused condensed quite quickly. Orders of magnitude faster than it took for the whole solar system to condense.
Note the phrasing that original dust cloud was not solar wide.
maybe it's not that the dust is gone. Perhaps the real reason is some other civilization interfering with our ability to see infrared from that star. As if they pulled a big anti-infrared cloak over their solar system while they beaver away building a new DeathStar with which to destroy our Earth.
Nah, that'd be silly.
Yes, that's right, it's man-made global warming that's the cause. Each and every time every one of us turns on a light, our carbon footprint grows and grows and grows like the nose on Pinocchio and now it has grown so big that it has begun to affect a star 450 light years away!
We must do something! Now! Now! Now! We must throw away all our technology. More than that, we must kill - ethically, of course, and in the name of science - 95% of the earth's population. The survivors must then lead lives of neolithic gatherers (hunting, of course, will not be allowed as it entails killing furry little creatures who look ever so cute in television documentaries). These gatherers will be ruled by eco-friendly druids, who, of course, will have to keep some technology for themselves - air conditioners, central heating, electricity, etc - just to keep control until they are certain that everyone is completely enlightened.
Surely in normal planetary formation, the thing gradually coalesce over time. At some point they'll become solid objects having significant mass, then they'll clear their orbits pretty damned quickly I'd have though.
We may just have happened to tune in at the right point of what is actually a very long process.
Now, we also know that large gas-giants in orbits fairly close to their star are rather common. One Jupiter-sized object with an orbital period similar to ours would hoover up the majority of the insystem crap fairly sharpish. If you add another big one further out that happens to be doing the bit of its orbit that's in our direction at the moment, you get the results seen.