Two planets collide around the star HD 172555!

[2552]

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2009/08/10/when-worlds-collide/

The Spitzer Space Telescope has detected signs of an interplanetary smashup, and oh, what a colossal event it was… apparently, 100 light years away around the young star HD 172555, an object the size of the Moon slammed into a planet the size of Mercury!

n.

 

[RisingFury]

The silica gets fused into glass. But that means that there was a pretty big impact that must have happened at that star, and that in turn means that two planet-sized objects must have had a very bad day.

:lol::lol:



I must say I'm not surprised by the event, but I am surprised that we managed to detect it. This might be further evidence that our Moon might have been formed in a giant impact after all. Hopefully in the coming years, we're able to observe the system up close and detect the debris field. I wonder if the planet is showing signs of rings around it - if it wasn't completely destroyed.

 

[ar81]

The debris were already mined by UFOs to build their ships, you will not find any.:lol:
In some years we may not be able to distinguish between traces of the impact and our own garbage in space.

 

[RisingFury]

The debris were already mined by UFOs to build their ships, you will not find any.:lol:

Glass ships? Don't bring any rocks.

In some years we may not be able to distinguish between traces of the impact and our own garbage in space.

Err..................... whatever you say

 

[Artlav]

And, yet again, some weird and unrelated animation instead of any kind of real data.

 

[T.Neo]

And, yet again, some weird and unrelated animation instead of any kind of real data.

Real data bores the public. Weird and unrelated animations do not.

 

[RisingFury]

And, yet again, some weird and unrelated animation instead of any kind of real data.

How are you gonna get any real data?

It's not like we can figure out the angle of impact, it's exact velocity,...
Even the sizes of the two objects is a guess.

 

[ar81]

How are you gonna get any real data?

It's not like we can figure out the angle of impact, it's exact velocity,...
Even the sizes of the two objects is a guess.

But a sequence of blurry real pics would have been better...

 

[Viper1]

Amazingly similar to my desktop picture!

 

[RisingFury]

But a sequence of blurry real pics would have been better...

If you took the time to read the article, you'd know they used spectroscopy for the observations. You can't actually see the planets - there have only been a couple of examples where we could see the planet directly - either cos the planet is far away, or cos it's very young and still glowing in the IR.

An image such as this means a lot to scientists, but exactly nothing to the general public.

 

[ex-orbinaut]

We have only JUST started discovering planets (in OTHER systems, I might add!) and a collision event between two of them is detected. It must be incredibly common.

Does anybody have any estimates on the distance of the planets from their star? Just off hand I was thinking of the fabled Goldilocks zone... and the thin chance that "something" might have found out what it is REALLY like to have their world fall out from under and desintegrate around them....

 

[ijuin]

Collisions between planets isn't that uncommon even in our own solar system--not only was the Moon created by a Mars-sized planet smacking into the Earth, but it is believed that a Moon-sized object smacked into Mercury and blasted off half of its mantle (which is why it has such a large core compared to its overall size), and Uranus is believed to have been knocked onto its side by being hit by an Earth-sized object.

The more interesting bit here is that we are getting to see the debris field during the 100 million years or less before gravitational interactions clear it away.

 

[Nerull]

A typical 'blurry pic' from Spitzer's IRS:

Exciting, huh?