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Collision!


Lilly

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:no: When Worlds Collide! What a classic! Great Post Lilly. Edited by DONTEATUS
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I read these stars are F class stars, and I think such stars take 75-100 million years to form. Just slightly faster than the Sun took at 100 myr.

The planets would take up to a 1 billion years to form.

One dust ring is estimated to be slighty more accumulated, in orbit around one of the stars; which is itself slightly larger.

The ring is estimated to be at a distance of .55 AU. At that close, it will fall into the stars within only 1000 years.

So, here we are seeing something quite rare.

BTW, the term planetesimals is how these objects are referenced by the astronomers. Nonethless, after 1 billion years, what orbits these stars are probably planets.

I was just going to guess maybe another star passed near to the binaries. Or, maybe sometimes it's not easy for planets to orbit within a binary system. In either case, an unstable orbit might arise.

Preprint- Alycia J. Weinberger

Edited by merril
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That is a great artical Miss Lilly and gives me some great Science Fiction shorts story Ideas and that came to mind in reading that one..Thanks..

Pavot B)

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Two Earth-like planets colliding? That's cool. But if people lived on those planets then it's not so cool. I mean if we found out we were going to soon be colliding with a neibor planet, can you imagine how scared everyone on the planet would be?
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Two Planets Suffer Violent Collision

ScienceDaily (Sep. 24, 2008) Two terrestrial planets orbiting a mature sun-like star some 300 light-years from Earth recently suffered a violent collision, astronomers at UCLA, Tennessee State University and the California Institute of Technology will report in a December issue of the Astrophysical Journal.

"It's as if Earth and Venus collided with each other," said Benjamin Zuckerman, UCLA professor of physics and astronomy and a co-author on the paper. "Astronomers have never seen anything like this before. Apparently, major catastrophic collisions can take place in a fully mature planetary system."

"If any life was present on either planet, the massive collision would have wiped out everything in a matter of minutes — the ultimate extinction event," said co-author Gregory Henry, an astronomer at Tennessee State University (TSU). "A massive disk of infrared-emitting dust circling the star provides silent testimony to this sad fate."

Zuckerman, Henry and Michael Muno, an astronomer at Caltech at the time of the research, were studying a star known as BD+20 307, which is surrounded by a shocking 1 million times more dust than is orbiting our sun. The star is located in the constellation Aries. The astronomers gathered X-ray data using the orbiting Chandra X-ray Observatory and brightness data from one of TSU's automated telescopes in southern Arizona, hoping to measure the age of the star.

"We expected to find that BD+20 307 was relatively young, a few hundred million years old at most, with the massive dust ring signaling the final stages in the formation of the star's planetary system," Muno said.

Those expectations were shown to be premature, however, when Carnegie Institution of Washington astronomer Alycia Weinberger announced in the May 20, 2008, issue of the Astrophysical Journal that BD+20 307 is actually a close binary star — two stars orbiting around their common center of mass.

"That discovery radically revised the interpretation of the data and transformed the star into a unique and intriguing system," said TSU astronomer Francis Fekel who, along with TSU's Michael Williamson, was asked to provide additional spectroscopic data from another TSU automated telescope in Arizona to assist in comprehending this exceptional binary system.

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All I got to say is.....wow :o !

--Mandalore--

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Edited by --Mandalore--
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pretty cool...would of been nice to see it happen live 300 years ago

gasp!!! could this haave something in common with the SNAFU showing up on the 14th? :w00t::D

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pretty cool...would of been nice to see it happen live 300 years ago

"Recent" in astronomical terms means within the past few million years. :lol: But it would be fun to watch. I've read of a theory that the asteroid belt is the rubble of two exploded (or more likely collided) planets. Not sure what I think about this theory yet, but it's made some pretty interesting predictions, such as asteroids havng numerous small moons, prediction of meteor showers, comet rockiness and the prediction of saltwater in meteorite samples.

Where the astronomical types to comment?

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