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Sunday, October 28, 2012

Trillions of comets collide around Fomalhaut


Dust ring around the star Fomalhaut is created in the collision of comets thousands every day.

Located only at a distance of 25 light years from Earth, Fomalhaut is a fairly young star, twice as massive as our sun, and discovered in 1980 in a large amount of dust.

Now, astronomers using a telescope Herschel discovered a dense strip of dusty materials, about half of which is water ice at the edges of the system.


Time is very far from the star, at a distance of more than 100 times the distance from Earth to the Sun. Because of this it is very cold, about -200 degrees Celsius.

This disk is similar to the Kuiper Belt in our solar system, which is beyond the planet Neptune, but much younger.

Dusty zone is narrow and is not centered with respect to the star, meaning that there may not be a planet orbiting close around her.

To obtain such a quantity of dust requires the equivalent of comets, whose total area is 2000 km, and which should be destroyed every day.

Such a large number of collisions mean that there are trillions of comets in this ring, containing as much material as is equivalent to one hundred planets like our Earth.

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