It would be just my luck. I find a nice planet near a warm balmy star and purchase a place as my retirement spot. Next thing I know, all of my real estate is being sucked into space in the ultimate depreciation disaster. That is what scientists caught recently (sans the retiree) when it found the first known case of such a planet vaporized by its nearby star and gradually being sucked away.
The star is KIC-12557548 with a temperature of 4200°C. That produces a temperature as high as 1800°C on the planet surface which is hot enough to melt and evaporate rocks. The result is that the planet is being reduced to dust in the form of pyroxene or aluminium oxide.
Dr Jon Jenkins from the SETI Institute and his colleagues made the discovery with NASA’s Kepler space telescope. They found a “long comet-like debris trail behind a disintegrating planet not much bigger than Mercury.”
While gas planets slowly evaporate, this is the first rocky planet to be found evaporating.
For my part, I am just interested in the cosmic property dispute. If my property is vaporized and sucked into space, do I lose all proprietary as well as planetary claim? The answer would seem to be yes. Unless you can exercise dominion and control over the dust, it would appear to be free for the capture.
As a requiem for this planet, I leave it with the following tribute:
Source: ABC
no, unfortunately I am in Florida and it stopped short of us….but I saw pictures and some were stunning. I also remember using a pinhole camera to watch one as a kid and was amazed at how well the image was conveyed…here’s a list of upcomings but I think we won’t see another for a very long time…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_solar_eclipses_in_the_21st_century
We can do what that star is doing to that planet with hair-trigger nuclear missiles that, when fired, will destroy the human species as a side effect of security.
Idealist, I had the handicap of not having the glasses so I made one of the pinhole cameras using a box and having to experience it without looking at it. That may have actually heightened the experience. We also had so many trees and large bushes around us and in our yard that only a small section of the driveway was clear of a cast shadow so all of the little sun-sprites caused by the leaves were unavoidable and everywhere, on the house, garage, fence, part of the driveway and the street (grey concrete). A lot of them were out of focus of course (size of ‘hole’/ distance from focal plane) but you could see even in them that they grew more and then less circular. It was spooky when the bird sounds stopped.
I’ll keep my fingers crossed for you on getting to see a full eclipse.
Lotta,
Your full eclipse experience…..!!!
I’ve only had the partial to the point of the chill and the birds quieting, but a enormous realization of how exposed we are.
Will try for a total. Gotta see the result of the million pinhols camera obscuras.
Lotta,
Thank you, my second time to say awesome, although both firefly and the sun deserve it.
must see if can get netflix here.
Woosty=^..^ , I only saw pictures but it was outstanding, I would have only seen a partial here in MO. I did see a full eclipse sometime in the 80’s. It was a surreal experience, the birds became silent at the peak of darkness then started chirping like it was dawn after that was over and it began to become ‘light’ again. All of the trees and bushes cast a million shadows of the sun being consumed, the little spaces between the leaves acted like pin-hole cameras and the images danced with every breeze, It was magical to the point of being transcendental.
It also made me appreciate how terrifying something like that could be for civilizations without the benefit of science. It wasn’t a large step (in time) between me being enchanted and delighted v. some feather-bedecked priest looking for babies or virgins to sacrifice. LOL, gotta’ love science.
Did you get to see it?
barkin’dog,
You won’t see this, but the answer to most things on a large scale is GRAVITY RULES, even if it is relatively the smallest of forces.
A system would, as you conceive it, would be one of gravitational objects moving in a relationship to each so as to continue over astronoomical periods of time. Our solar system is dominated gravity (mass) wise by the 99.9 percent of the sun. The system took a long time to self-create and even longer to decay.
lottakatz that’s awesome…did you see the recent fire ring eclipse?
rafflaw
1, May 24, 2012 at 11:18 am
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rafflaw it is Firefly, one of Joss Whedons best series and available on Netflix last I checked….it’s an uber post-modern space cowboy thingy…
BEHOLD the POWER and MAJESTY of our solar MASTER! 🙂
(Thanks for the Firefly vids Woosty, great series.)
Full screen is pretty impressive.
“This video takes SDO images and applies additional processing to enhance the structures visible. While there is no scientific value to this processing, it does result in a beautiful, new way of looking at the sun. The original frames are in the 171 Angstrom wavelength of extreme ultraviolet. This wavelength shows plasma in the solar atmosphere, called the corona, that is around 600,000 Kelvin. The loops represent plasma held in place by magnetic fields. They are concentrated in “active regions” where the magnetic fields are the strongest. These active regions usually appear in visible light as sunspots. The events in this video represent 24 hours of activity on September 25, 2011″
Wow, politicians on a cosmic scale.
Sun comes up, sun goes down. Or, is it the planet moves into the sun? Dont all planets revolve around the a sun in each solar system? Can there be planets in a system without a sun? Can there be a sun without planets?
Dog, the questions keep popping up.
That is one hot planet! Woosty, I had never heard of that series, but your clips are hilarious. This latest one shows the actor that played the “pirate” in Dodgeball.
Every planet in the “life zone” around a star faces that future, including the Earth.
The technical trick is to learn for-real space travel, then follow the path from one habitable planet to another, as each star enters the demise phase.
It is probably the best place to look for extraterrestrial life forms too, because if there were any intelligent life forms, they would either have developed advanced technology, including signaling capacity, and would have asked for help, or would have fled the scene via space-travel technology.
If they had to stick around they would get vaporized.
New legal specialty?