NEARBY STAR IS A GOOD MODEL OF OUR EARLY SOLAR SYSTEM
Written by Brainer11 | Published in Space | May 3
http://gervise.com/686-2The Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy aircraft was starting the second half of an overnight mission on 28th January 2015. It turned north for a flight to western Oregon, then back home to NASA’s Armstrong Flight Research Center in Palmdale, California. On the way, pilots turned the plane to focus the telescope at a nearby star. Iowa State University’s Massimo Marengo and other astronomers were aboard to monitor the mission and collect infrared data about the star.
The star is called epsilon Eridani and is approximately 10 light years away from the sun. It’s like our sun, but one-fifth the age. Since 2004, Marengo, an Iowa State associate professor of physics and astronomy, and other astronomers have been studying the star and its planetary system. In a 2009 scientific paper, the astronomers used data from NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope to illustrate the star’s disk of fine dust and debris left over from the formation of planets and the collisions of asteroids and comets. They reported that the disk had separate belts of asteroids, resembling the asteroid and Kuiper belts of our solar system.
A new scientific paper, just published online by The Astronomical Journal, uses SOFIA and Spitzer data to confirm there are separate inner and outer disk structures. ...
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