Pasadena, Calif. -- Astronomers have laid down the cosmic equivalent of yellow "caution" tape around super hot stars, marking the zones where cooler stars are in danger of having their developing planets blasted away.
In a new study from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope, scientists report the first maps of so-called planetary "danger zones." These are areas where winds and radiation from super hot stars can strip other young, cooler stars like our sun of their planet-forming materials. The results show that cooler stars are safe as long as they lie beyond about 1.6 light-years, or nearly 10 trillion miles, of any hot stars. But cooler stars inside the zone are likely to see their potential planets boiled off into space.
"Stars move around all the time, so if one wanders into the danger zone and stays for too long, it will probably never be able to form planets," said Zoltan Balog of the University of Arizona, Tucson, lead author of the new report, appearing May 20 in the Astrophysical Journal.
The findings are helping astronomers pinpoint the types of environments where planets beyond our solar system, including some that might be hospitable to life, are most likely to form.
Planets are born out of a flat disk of gas and dust, called a protoplanetary disk, that swirls around a young star. They are believed to clump together out of the disk over millions of years, growing in size like dust bunnies as they sweep through the dust.
Previous studies revealed that these protoplanetary disks can be destroyed by the most massive, hottest type of star in the universe, called an O-star, over a period of about a million years. Ultraviolet radiation from an O-star heats and evaporates the dust and gas in the disk, then winds from the star blow the material away. Last year, Balog and his team used Spitzer to capture a stunning picture of this "photoevaporation" process at work
(http://www.spitzer.caltech.edu/Media/ha ... /20061003/ ).
Moorese, see! Dust bunnies are everywhere.
ADAM, I'm sure NASA would let you roll out a Benjamin or two, to see that strip.
And LTS TRN 2, tell your good friends to watch out. I'm here to help.
