Nearly 20 years ago, astronomers observed a massive cloud of fine dust particles around a young star located just 63 light-years from Earth. In recent observations from Webb Space Telescopehowever, the dust cloud had mysteriously disappeared. Now a new paper suggests that the dust cloud may have been caused by a violent event that pulverized large celestial bodies and spread their debris across The star system Beta Pictoris.
Using new data from Webb, a group of scientists noticed significant changes in the energy signatures emitted by dust grains found around Beta Pictoris, with particles that had completely disappeared. By comparing Webb’s data with older observations taken by Spitzer Space Telescope in 2004 and 2005, scientists suggested that a cataclysmic collision between large asteroids occurred about 20 years ago that shattered the celestial bodies into fine dust particles smaller than powdered sugar. The dust likely cooled as it moved away from the star, so it no longer emits the same thermal characteristics first observed by Spitzer. The new findings were presented Monday at the annual meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Madison, Wisconsin.
Christine Chen, an astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute and Johns Hopkins University, first observed Beta Pictoris in 2004 using the Spitzer Space Telescope. The young star system is home to the first debris disk ever imaged around another star, and it’s notable for being close and bright.
When Chen gets 12 hours of observations with Webb, she wants to go back and look at the same star system, Beta Pictoris, that has intrigued her all these years. This time, however, the star system didn’t seem quite so familiar. “I thought, ‘Oh my god, the features are gone,'” Chen told Gizmodo. “Is this real? And if so, then what happened?
Through the observations, Webb Chen, who led the new study, and her team focused on the heat emitted by crystalline silicates — minerals commonly found around young stars — and found no trace of the particles previously observed in 2004 and 2005.
“When astronomers look at the sky and see something, we always assume that everything is in a steady state, that it’s not changing,” Chen said. “The reason we think that is because if you think about the specific moment you’re looking at, it’s very short compared to how old these objects are, so we just think the chances of catching something interesting are very small.” “
This was clearly not the case for Beta Pictoris, a star system believed to be between 20 and 26 million years old. This is relatively young compared to our own solar system, which is approximately 4.6 billion years old. In their early years, star systems are more unpredictable because the terrestrial planets are still being formed by the collisions of giant asteroids.
Therefore, the changes observed in Beta Pictoris are quite significant. The dust cloud was 100,000 times larger than the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs, according to astronomers. This suggests that the collision that may have caused this massive cloud to form probably involved an asteroid the size of The newsthe second most massive body in the main asteroid belt, which stretches 329 miles (530 kilometers) across.
The dust is then blown outward by radiation from the star, and the dust near the star heats up and emits thermal radiation that was detected by Spitzer’s instruments. Webb’s new observations revealed that the dust had disappeared and not been replaced, pointing to a strong collision.
“We think that large collisions like this must have occurred in our solar system when it was of a similar age as part of the formation process of the terrestrial planet,” Chen said. “We can look at the old Earth surfaces of the Moon, Mars and Mercury, and they all have craters on them, which tells us that impacts were much more common when our solar system was young.”
Through recent observations of Beta Pictoris, scientists can investigate whether the formation process that shaped our solar system is rare or more common in the universe, and how these early collisions affect the habitability of a given star system.
“If this giant collision happens and there’s a cloud of dust spreading outward from the star,” Chen said. “You can imagine that there is some possibility that this cloud of dust, as it traveled to the planetary system, also encountered the planets and dumped dust on their planetary atmospheres.”
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