Does it work on carpets, rugs and floor coverings too?
Disappearing space dust belt baffles boffins
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 …
-
Friday 6th July 2012 07:59 GMT TeeCee
Super fast planetary formation - why?
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.