Planet Disappears From Sight Baffling Astronomers

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What was thought to be a planet beyond our solar system appears to have disappeared.

And the unexpected behaviour has led them to conclude that what they thought was a distant world never actually existed at all.

a planet beyond our solar system appears to have disappeared, exoplanet disappears suddenly, strange space phenomenon, a planet beyond our solar system appears to have disappeared, astronomers say.  And the unexpected behaviour has led them to conclude that what they thought was a distant world never actually existed at all.,
A planet has just disappeared in front of baffled astronomers… And now they think it actually was a cloud of dust

Instead, astronomers think that the phantom planet was actually a cloud of dust – left in the aftermath of a cosmic collision – that has since billowed out so much that it is now invisible.

The new paper proposes that the planet was actually the slowly expanding dust from a long ago collision that sent dust billowing into space.

It gradually disappeared as the debris cloud expanded to be so large that it could no longer be seen, and scientists now suspect that it would be a size larger than the orbit of Earth around the Sun.

Exoplanet Formalhaut b

When the exoplanet known as Fomalhaut b was first discovered, in the mid 2000s, it made history as one of the first worlds outside of our solar system to be seen directly.

Researchers had previously mostly inferred the existence of planets through their effects on stars or their shadows as they moved in front of stars, but this suspected planet was seen through numerous years of observations from Nasa’s Hubble Space Telescope.

Meanwhile, a giant asteroid is going to skim past Earth on April 29th.

A Ghost Planet and a new space phenomenon

But astronomers now think that those observations were actually the result of two icy bodies smashing into each other.

When they did, they left behind a cloud of fine dust particles that was visible through space – and it was that which was mistaken for another planet by astronomers on Earth, 25 light years away.

Though the discovery means that the original discovery appears to have been mistaken, it also opens up an entirely new – and perhaps more surprising – kind of discovery, in seeing such a crash.

The Hubble images might not show a planet but do show the aftermath of the suspect collision, allowing researchers a new phenomenon to research.

These collisions are exceedingly rare and so this is a big deal that we actually get to see evidence of one,” said Andras Gaspar, an assistant astronomer at the University of Arizona’s Steward Observatory and lead author of the new paper. “We believe that we were at the right place at the right time to have witnessed such an unlikely event with NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope.

The discovery might help shine a light not on where planets exist – but how they stop existing, when they destroy each other.

The Fomalhaut star system is the ultimate test lab for all of our ideas about how exoplanets and star systems evolve. We do have evidence of such collisions in other systems, but none of this magnitude has been observed in our solar system. This is a blueprint of how planets destroy each other. More strange space phenomena on Strange Sounds and Steve Quayle. [PNAS, Independent]

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2 Comments

  1. Gotta love all the bullshit theories these overpaid “scientists” come up with in order to justify their salaries. One cretin comes up with a brilliant theory in the “mid-2000’s” and all the other lemmings nod in unison for 15 years of sucking on the astronomy gravy train until finally the “planet” disappears…not to worry, though-now they all have a new rare phenomenon to “research” [on the gravy train still, of course] so the cycle of horse manure continues unbroken.

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