http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2012/07/poof-planet-forming-disk-vanishe.html
Two things are striking there:
1) That such a thing can happen at all.
2) That we were unbelievably lucky enough to witness an example of it happening.
Even if this happened to every star, how many would you have to be watching to expect to get a before-and-after of one of them in our lifetimes? There's a formal answer to that seemingly rhetorical question, and I'd like to see the math.
I wonder if the "dust" was actually ice. It's pretty easy to imagine a trillion grains of ice vanishing in a short time frame. Rock, that's trickier.
Could this have been an impact on some planetary or asteroid body further from the star? In the two years since, the dust may have cooled beyond detectability?
Inmigrating Jovian? I'd be interested to know if anyone's looked for planets around this star.
Two questions: why do they think the system is 10 million yrs old? and what if the ring disappeared because the star tilted edge on to our p.o.v.?
Then the dust would obscure its light, easily detectable from here. How would an entire dust cloud tilt in unison in the first place? They should be stationary from whatever angle they formed at (like Uranus's rings being as titled as their planet).
He's probably thinking of the proper motion of the star bringing us into the plane of the disk (similar to how Saturn's rings "disappear" every few years).
But the timescales involved with this would be enormous and as Explorer1 said, the star would noticably dim.
Besides I don't think circumstellar disks are nearly as thin as planetary disks.
Vultur, your math is right, but the key question is how many stars we are observing. The odds of seeing any particular star's once-in-a-lifetime event is essentially zero. The odds of seeing one if we observe millions of stars starts to become credible (with caveats).
So without saying any more than that about the specifics of this event, if we are not similarly tracking millions of stars, then this is probably not a once-in-a-star's-lifetime event.
If we imagine that each Mars-sized planetesimal arises from the collision of 10 Luna-sized planetesimals, and each Earth-sized planet arises from the collision of 10 Marses, then for a system to acquire the quartet of terrestrial planets that our solar system has would involve about 500 collisions. Forming the cores of the gas giants would involve far more, putting the number into the thousands. And many other collisions would take place on the sub-Luna level. So I suspect that is more likely the kind of event we're seeing rather than the one and only disappearance of the only dusty disc this star will ever have.
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