Alien dust kicked up...new forms discovered!

This is very interesting, indeed!

New observations have found evidence for planet formation around stars much more massive than the sun, as well as dusty debris – thought to be leftovers from collisions between rocky planetary embryos. There's a twist: The dust has a completely different chemical makeup from the composition of our own solar system.

A completely different chemical make up? What could that mean?

The strange dust that shows different chemical markers than what we find in our own neighborhood is in a star system about 500 light-years from Earth.

Full article here.

This is so cool!

You are continually putting up excellent threads!!!
S&F
I find it very interesting, for instance what checial testing would you use to determine an undeterminable substance?

Guess it just says this is foregin or unknown, i think from hollywood the computer comes back with the message:
"not of planet earth"

but the entire solar system? cool

Amazing.

However I am not surprised. I expect these types of developments.

This is just the tip of the iceberg, much more is sure to come!!

Originally posted by InertiaZero


A completely different chemical make up? What could that mean?

I don't know, other than to say this.

Perhaps there are literally countless possible types of chemicals that can be formed hypothetically.

This will make planetary exploration more difficult however, because we will have to reevaluate everything depending on what solar system we are in.

However this does indicate that the mining opportunities of deep space are virtually limitless and EXTREMELY rare and valuable!!!

reply to post by InertiaZero


Intersting Indeed!!

Good Find S&F

I think this is only the beginning.

There is an infinite amount of things we can learn about other places, think the drake equation...

reply to post by InertiaZero

A completely different chemical make up? What could that mean?

It's explained in the article you linked:

From your source: Typically, dust debris around other stars, or our own sun, is of the olivine, pyroxene, or silica variety – minerals commonly found on Earth.

Dust clouds around star nurseries are analyzed using infrared spectroscopy, which is good at detecting chemical compounds rather than atoms. The minerals mentioned above are all compounds.

Photon energies associated with this part of the infrared (from 1 to 15 kcal/mole) are not large enough to excite electrons, but may induce vibrational excitation of covalently bonded atoms and groups. Source

So they're seeing absorption lines in funny places along the infrared spectrum, lines that don't correspond to the chemical compounds we know and thus are probably caused by hitherto unknown compounds. Spectrography probably can't tell us what they are, so they're likely to remain a mystery for a long time. Maybe for ever.

Denying ignorance: this news doesn't mean that we've discovered the existence of elements not present in the Periodic Table, or some new law of physics. They do suggest the existence of previously unknown chemical processes.

Originally posted by Astyanax
Denying ignorance: this news doesn't mean that we've discovered the existence of elements not present in the Periodic Table, or some new law of physics. They do suggest the existence of previously unknown chemical processes.

Young star, bigger than ours - different gravity pull, fiercer solar winds, dust is probably due to already/semi-formed planets colliding, which in turn requires huge amounts of pressure as well as releases massive amounts of energy as well as other factors unknown to me.

Sure is a set of conditions we've not seen before which may lead to a chemical reaction process unknown to us thusfar.

Starred for denying ignorance!

And nice find Inertia, S+F for you too.

-m0r