beta Pic dust, was Re: ALERT!! Possible alien bacteria recovered ALIVE

From: Michael M. Butler (butler@comp-lib.org)
Date: Sat Nov 25 2000 - 14:04:05 MST


Beta Pic has a dust disk around it, doesn't it? Pretty trippy to think
of a star fifty light years away as a clear dust source here. What are
typical speeds of these particles when they arrive in our neighborhood?
I see that some folks claim dust rings in the disk might have been
formed by a star passing beta Pic only 100kyears ago. Is that enough
time for dust to arrive here? What I'm trying to get at is, has the dust
been arriving all along from the disk, or is it a result of recent
"swirls" associated with ring formation? Hmm.

Amara Graps wrote:
>
> >P.S. One item I discuss in my article is a piece of news for many:
> >
> >A meteor radar station in New Zealand, the Advanced Meteor Orbit Radar
> >station, has been collecting data of about 1000 radar meteors per day,
> >of which 2 per day are interstellar in origin (not bound to the
> >Sun). After some years of collecting data, there is enough data
> >(thousands of detections) to show that one clear source of the
> >interstellar dust particles (about 40 microns in size) is the nearby
> >star beta Pictoris.
>
> **********************************************************************
> Amara Graps | Max-Planck-Institut fuer Kernphysik
> Interplanetary Dust Group | Saupfercheckweg 1
> +49-6221-516-543 | 69117 Heidelberg, GERMANY
> Amara.Graps@mpi-hd.mpg.de * http://www.mpi-hd.mpg.de/dustgroup/~graps
> **********************************************************************
> "Never fight an inanimate object." - P. J. O'Rourke



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