Planet building in the Pleiades
UCLA and the Gemini Observatory issued a press release on Wednesday announcing that evidence has been found for planet formation around the star HD 23514 in the Pleiades star cluster. Using an infrared-sensitive instrument, they were able to pick up heat emissions in the dust cloud circling the star. This heat is the result of planetary “embryos” colliding in space. One current theory is that the formation of the moon resulted from a collision of the early Earth and another Mars-sized proto-planet.
From the article:
Using an infrared sensitive camera (MICHELLE) on the Gemini North Telescope, Joseph Rhee of UCLA and his collaborators have measured heat from hot dust surrounding a 100 million year old star in the bright star cluster. The star has properties very much like our Sun except that it is 45 times younger and is orbited by hundreds of thousands of times more dust than our Sun. The star is also one of the very few solar-type stars known to be orbited by warm dust particles.
These warm emissions betray catastrophic collisions in an evolving young planetary system around an adolescent-age solar type star. The emission appears to originate from dust located in the terrestrial planet zone between about 1/4 to two astronomical units (AUs) from the parent star HD 23514, a region corresponding to the orbits of Mercury and Mars in our solar system.
This is really cool. Hopefully, other scientists will confirm these findings.
