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Two Families of Comets Found Around Nearby Star

posted by LaminatorX on Monday October 27 2014, @06:10AM   Printer-friendly
from the New-family dept.
Science

melikamp writes:

According to the ESO Science Release, a French team of astronomers has studied nearly 500 individual comets orbiting the star Beta Pictoris and has discovered that they belong to two distinct families of exocomets: old exocomets that have made multiple passages near the star, and younger exocomets that probably came from the recent breakup of one or more larger objects.

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  • (Score: 2) by frojack on Monday October 27 2014, @06:18AM

    by frojack (1554) on Monday October 27 2014, @06:18AM (#110440) Journal

    younger exocomets that probably came from the recent breakup of one or more larger objects.

    Maybe that star has an Exo-oort cloud [wikipedia.org] too, and some larger planets to disrupt them and send them toward the star?

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    • (Score: 2) by sudo rm -rf on Monday October 27 2014, @03:17PM

      by sudo rm -rf (2357) on Monday October 27 2014, @03:17PM (#110550) Journal
      Maybe Beta Pictoris b [wikipedia.org] is the culprit? From wiki:

      It has a mass between 4 and 11 Jupiter masses and a radius around 65% larger than Jupiter's. It orbits at 9 AU from Beta Pictoris (close to the plane of the debris disk orbiting the star) with a low eccentricity and a period of 20–21 years, and is the only known planet in the Beta Pictoris system.