Planetary Collision in young solar system.

[3488]

Spitzer Space Telescope has detected orbital debris from a potential impact between a Moon type world & a Mercury type one.

HD 172555, which is about 12 million years old & is approx 100 light years away from our Solar System, in the far southern constellation Pavo the Peacock.

HD 172555 is an A5 main sequence star & is part of the Beta Pictoris moving group.

Planetary collision in orbit around the star HD 172555.

Andrew Brown.

 

[DigitalNinja]

Been a lurker on the forums for a while, never bothered to sign up, but this made me.

This planet, is the smallest exoplanet found!

The size of mercury (Speculated)

Smaller than earth!!!

And very cool.

 

[3488]

Welcome to SDC DigitalNinja.

Also the article states that one of the suspects was possibly a Lunar type world in orbit around HD 172555. So perhaps one of the planets was approximately the size & mass of our Moon, or a mass of approx of 22% that of Mercury. That would be one hell of an impact!!!!!

That would be like the Earth being hit by something twice the mass of Mars!!! :shock:

This star requires further observation, to see if there are any gas giants, etc further out, though that will take time.

Andrew Brown.

 

[DigitalNinja]

Amazing that we can see something like that Andrew as well. Special at such a small scale. If something happened like on the earth and the planet that hit us when we were forming. I wonder how much would show up from that.

 

[yevaud]

The impact of the two would have more than likely simply smashed the smaller, exceeding the gravitational binding energy of the smaller body.

 

[TimeDog]

im impressed we could detect something so small, let alone its remains. spitzer sure is a nice tool

 

[robv82]

The data.

http://gallery.spitzer.caltech.edu/Imag ... sc2009-16b

 

[ramparts]

im impressed we could detect something so small, let alone its remains. spitzer sure is a nice tool

We actually aren't "seeing" anything that small. They used a much more subtle method to make this discovery - they looked at the light from the system and saw the chemical signatures of the remnants of the collision

 

[EarthlingX]

The data.

http://gallery.spitzer.caltech.edu/Imag ... sc2009-16b

Thanks for the link.

There s another peak a little further from first. Could something be forming around the crash site ?

 

[ramparts]

Those peaks aren't locations - they're wavelengths! That plot is called a spectrum - it shows how much light the system is emitting at each wavelength (or each color). So the other peak just has to do with other chemical signatures in the star or the surrounding dust.

 

[EarthlingX]

Thanks for explanation.
That other peak would be part of a chemical signature represented by one color line ?

 

[TimeDog]

The data.

http://gallery.spitzer.caltech.edu/Imag ... sc2009-16b

excellent

 

[ramparts]

Thanks for explanation.
That other peak would be part of a chemical signature represented by one color line ?

Exactly Well, not just one line - most chemical signatures have multiple lines around the same area, especially complex molecules like dust grains, which have lots of different ways of emitting light. The data was taken in the infrared wavelengths, so you'll see a lot of dust signatures in there