Massive dust storm around a star discovered
21 July 2005
by Richard
Conan-Davies
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Huge quantities of warm dusty debris surrounding a star with luminosity and mass similar to the sun's, but located 300 light-years from Earth have been spotted by astronomers at UCLA using the Gemini Telescope. It is thought that the extraordinary amount of the dust suggests a violent history of cosmic collisions between asteroids and comets, or perhaps even between planets. Eric Becklin, a UCLA professor of physics and astronomy explained that " What is so amazing is that the amount of dust around this star is approximately 1 million times greater than the dust around the sun," Benjamin Zuckerman of UCLA physics and astronomy department and member of NASA's Astrobiology Institute suggested that "The amount of warm dust near BD+20 307 is so unprecedented I wouldn't be surprised if it was the result of a massive collision between planet-size objects, for example, a collision like the one which many scientists believe formed Earth's moon," This discovery will provide some good evidence and ideas for the way our own solar system formed some 5 billion years ago. |
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Original press release from UCLA
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