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File: The Mysterious Case of the Disappearing Dust.jpg

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English: An artist's concept illustrates a dusty planet-forming disk, similar to the one that vanished around the star called TYC 8241 2652.

Imagine if the rings of Saturn suddenly disappeared. Astronomers have witnessed the equivalent around a young sun-like star called TYC 8241 2652. Enormous amounts of dust known to circle the star are unexpectedly nowhere to be found. "It's like the classic magician's trick: now you see it, now you don't. Only in this case we're talking about enough dust to fill an inner solar system and it really is gone!" said Carl Melis of the University of California, San Diego, who led the new study appearing in the July 5 issue of the journal Nature.

A dusty disk around TYC 8241 2652 was first seen by the NASA Infrared Astronomical Satellite (IRAS) in 1983, and continued to glow brightly for 25 years. The dust was thought to be due to collisions between forming planets, a normal part of planet formation. Like Earth, warm dust absorbs the energy of visible starlight and reradiates that energy as infrared, or heat, radiation.
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Source https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/the-mysterious-case-of-the-disappearing-dust
Author NASA/JPL-Caltech

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Public domain This file is in the public domain in the United States because it was solely created by NASA. NASA copyright policy states that "NASA material is not protected by copyright unless noted". (See Template:PD-USGov, NASA copyright policy page or JPL Image Use Policy.)
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The Mysterious case of the Disappearing dust.

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5 July 2012

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current19:56, 25 January 2013Thumbnail for version as of 19:56, 25 January 20133,200 × 2,400 (2.88 MB)wikimediacommons>Stas1995User created page with UploadWizard

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