Dust Today, Gone Tomorrow: Astronomers Discover Houdini-Like Vanishing Act in Space

ScienceDaily (July 5, 2012) — Astronomers report a baffling discovery never seen before: An extraordinary amount of dust around a nearby star has mysteriously disappeared.

www.sciencedaily.com...

This is truly crazy, I'm still stuck trying to wrap my brain around this one... I can only imagine the conversations around the water cooler at UC San Diego.

"It's like the classic magician's trick -- now you see it, now you don't," said Carl Melis, a postdoctoral scholar at UC San Diego and lead author of the research. "Only in this case, we're talking about enough dust to fill an inner solar system, and it really is gone!"

"It's as if the rings around Saturn had disappeared," said co-author Benjamin Zuckerman, a UCLA professor of physics and astronomy. "This is even more shocking because the dusty disc of rocky debris was bigger and much more massive than Saturn's rings. The disc around this star, if it were in our solar system, would have extended from the sun halfway out to Earth, near the orbit of Mercury."

I wonder if there's any relation to signs of the universe collapsing with this... ya know, the whole heart beat of the universe thing... the introduction and loss of matter possibly.

The research on this cosmic vanishing act, which occurred around a star some 450 light years from Earth, in the direction of the constellation Centaurus, appears July 5 in the journal Nature.

"A perplexing thing about this discovery is that we don't have a satisfactory explanation to address what happened around this star," said Melis, a former UCLA astronomy graduate student. "The disappearing act appears to be independent of the star itself, as there is no evidence to suggest that the star zapped the dust with some sort of mega-flare or any other violent event."

Melis describes the star, designated TYC 8241 2652, as a "young analog of our sun" that only a few years ago displayed all of the characteristics of "hosting a solar system in the making," before transforming completely. Now, very little of the warm, dusty material thought to originate from collisions of rocky planets is apparent.

Just imagine... you're sitting there, looking at TYC 8241 2652 and you see this...




the next thing you know.... it looks like this




Where did all the dust go? What happened to all the material that was to become planets, and possibly homes to life like our own? Did some aliens go and collect it, so they could use it to form their own planetary system, maybe some form of farming for resources? Does the universe just pick and choose intelligently what is to be created, and what is to be dissolved? So many questions... lol

Any answers?

Nothing like this has ever been seen in the many hundreds of stars that astronomers have studied for dust rings," Zuckerman said. "This disappearance is remarkably fast, even on a human time scale, much less an astronomical scale. The dust disappearance at TYC 8241 2652 was so bizarre and so quick, initially I figured that our observations must simply be wrong in some strange way."

The crazy part is... this didn't take billions, millions, or even thousands of years to occur. So much for the 'slow paced' cosmological models of our universe...

Aliens clearing out a solar system of 'junk' to make it habitable for them?

Just a thought, and not one that is too out of the realm of possibility either.

dust near star?


hmmmmm.



star have big gravity


and fire HOT.



me thinks dust go INTO FIRE


FIRE HOT HOT.


FIRE EAT DUST.


Hot.....




peace

reply to post by Kryties


Thats just Red Dwarf, humor, My friend..........

..................

Well thats the vacuum of space in action right there my friends, literally. The dust has been sucked somewhere else!

Born about 10 million years ago, the TYC 8241 2652 1 system was chugging along just fine before 2009. Its so-called circumstellar disk glowed at the infrared wavelength of 10 microns, indicating it was warm and lay close to the star — in the same sort of region that, in our own sun’s neighborhood, gave rise to the terrestrial planets Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars. The infrared data reveal that the dust was about 180 degrees Celsius and located as close to its star as Mercury is to the sun.

and then...

By January 2010, however, nearly all infrared light from the dusty disk had vanished. “We had never seen anything like this before,” said astronomer Carl Melis of the University of California, San Diego. “We were all scratching our heads and wondering what the hell did we do wrong?” But subsequent observations with both infrared satellites and ground-based telescopes confirmed the surprising discovery, he said: “The disk was gone.”

Melis and his colleagues report the mystery online Wednesday in Nature — but they don’t know what caused it.

“It’s very bizarre,” he said. “Nothing like this was ever predicted.” He said there’s no way something could eclipse the infrared-emitting disk for more than 2 years, because such an object would be immense. Furthermore, the star itself didn’t fade.

Melis speculates that an earlier collision between two objects — perhaps two boulders, two asteroids or even two planets — orbiting the star produced the dust grains that emitted the infrared light. Then, either the star’s light blew the dust out of the planetary system or the dust plunged into the star.

“It’s a really interesting mystery,” said astronomer Scott Kenyon of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts, who was not affiliated with the discovery team. “The observations certainly seem correct. It’s sort of amazing to have the dust in one of these disks go away so quickly. It’s hard to know exactly what happened.”

www.dailyherald.com...

I called up Giorgio, and he assured me that it was because of aliens. I'm not sure if I believe him... but, maybe.

Could a gamma ray burst do this I wonder? That's probably a stretch...

Maybe a rouge celestial body flew past, with enough gravity to either collect or sweep away all of this 'dust'...

I'm going with CIA coverup, and blaming it on Bush! That's easier than trying to figure it out... now I can sleep better.

reply to post by SoymilkAlaska


Well that's the only plausible explanation I can think of... however, the article says they've come up with a few mechanisms by which that could happen but none of them are compelling.

I'm thinking it may have something to do with quantum mechanics... or something like that. It's a very unusual scenario but according to quantum mechanics that dust could spontaneously vanish.

Where does it reference Houdini?

I know. Not the main point but the reference points to instantaneous.

Peace

Originally posted by ChaoticOrder
reply to post by SoymilkAlaska

 

Well that's the only plausible explanation I can think of... however, the article says they've come up with a few mechanisms by which that could happen but none of them are compelling.

I'm thinking it may have something to do with quantum mechanics... or something like that. It's a very unusual scenario but according to quantum mechanics that dust could spontaneously vanish.

I'm not so sure about the quantum mechanics application of a quantum vacuum spontaneously vanishing an entire dust cloud around a star. Unless there was some type of avalanche effect... From my understanding, I thought that always had to do with particles themselves, before actually arranging themselves into coherent atomic structures... but, I could be wrong. Ya know, like the whole big bang thing, and annihilation before the propagation of baryons and such, before light remained...

If you have any information that supports such a notion, please present it... I'd like to look it over. It's been a while since I researched or studied quantum mechanics, I'm a bit rusty...

Its actually a little head-scratching this one! This is the only way I can think of, or a wandering black hole?? Who knows.

Originally posted by jude11
Where does it reference Houdini?

I know. Not the main point but the reference points to instantaneous.

Peace

Yeah, I'd try not to over think the Harry Houdini reference...

Instantaneous is sort of a word just tossed around, it rarely ever is used and considered to retain the true definition.

Cause and effect are bound to time, there's no getting around it in my opinion. There's the theoretical Plank's time, and plank length of 10^-43 seconds, but the best our technology can do is measure up to 12x10^-18 seconds... which is about 10^24 times larger thank Plank's time.

But there can be argued that 'spooky action at a distance' or 'quantum entanglement' is a reality, which then brings us right back to instantaneous being plausible. I still doubt it though... I'm going with there having something to do with the observer that creates this very observation. I'm probably wrong... but yeah... lol.

Anyways... this wasn't 'instantaneous' either, it didn't necessarily happen over an extended period of time, but I highly doubt that it happened 'instantly'. I don't think that any of the astronomers researching this would imply such a premise either. That's way too much matter and energy to make such a transition for it to be boiled down to this, again, only opinion... fairly rooted one at that.

Those Hepa filters really do work you know.

P

I'm still going with aliens.

I'm serious, and by the looks of it some of you may be secretly thinking the same thing!

They seem to dismiss the idea of solar activity causing this, but then go on to say that they observed the star at 6 month intervals. What if there was huge solar activity taking place while the star was not under observation? An increased solar wind would disperse the lighter gas and dust leaving behind the heavier material 'which would become invisible to us'. Have they realy not thought of something as simple as this? It already follows what we know of solar system formation.

Love the idea of alien harvesters btw

DEATH STAR

armystrongstories.com...

cloud first observed in '83
still present 25 years later
'began dimming' in '09
and by may this year had been gone for two and a half years.
six months to go from apparently stable system to naked sun?
'quantum' got some splainin to do.

if you had a starfaring civilisation
desperate for raw materials
and you happened to be in the right locality
it would make sense to trawl yourself up a bunch of stardust
instead of waiting for it to congeal into planets and then blow them up again.

Originally posted by Qumulys

Its actually a little head-scratching this one! This is the only way I can think of, or a wandering black hole?? Who knows.

if it was a wondering black hole would the black hole not consume everything and not leave dust behind? im sure a physicist could explain why, maybe the black hole only took what it needed before it ended on the other side of a wormhole?

reply to post by FractalChaos13242017


a rouge celestial body?!
Kryties, do you know more about this than you are letting on?

Originally posted by Atzil321
They seem to dismiss the idea of solar activity causing this, but then go on to say that they observed the star at 6 month intervals. What if there was huge solar activity taking place while the star was not under observation? An increased solar wind would disperse the lighter gas and dust leaving behind the heavier material 'which would become invisible to us'. Have they realy not thought of something as simple as this? It already follows what we know of solar system formation.

Love the idea of alien harvesters btw

That would have to be one incredible solar flare, or series of activity to result in the removal of so much material. I'm not sure as to the make up of the 'clouds' that surrounded this star. But, it would seem rational to me... that an explanation suggesting that solar activity is responsible for this Houdini-like vanishing act of so much matter fails to explain anything at all. It's not as if one giant solar flare could do this, for they have 'direction'... although they do 'sweep' around, I can't possibly imagine that this is the case. I don't have all that much to go on, considering everything I know is mostly from www.spaceweather.com... and wiki lol.

Being 10 billion years old, and the clouds creation being hypothesized as resulting from the collision of two objects. This would seem to suggest that they were not molecular clouds, which implies density. Being that they may have been large bodies that collided, there were probably some rather large chunks. I wonder if they've been able to detect any planet like bodies orbiting this star since the disappearance of such 'dust'.

If anybody has any information about these topics, or this story in particular... please post what you can offer.

Looks like they've lost some valuable information. They should have watched this one more often.

Unless... Space bunnies! Damnit! Always mucking up the view!