Not to worry, its not our planet, but the cool artist rendering was too cool to pass up…we’ve been busy, but there are a lot of good articles I want to post up that I saw, mostly movie stuff, so maybe tomorrow those will find there way onto here.
from yahoo.com:
Stardust evidence points to planet collision
Sat Sep 20, 6:25 pm ET
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Masses of dust floating around a binary star system suggest that two Earth-like planets obliterated each other in a violent collision, U.S. researchers reported on Friday.
“It’s as if Earth and Venus collided with each other,” Benjamin Zuckerman, an astronomer at the University of California Los Angeles, who worked on the study, said in a statement.
“Astronomers have never seen anything like this before; apparently major, catastrophic, collisions can take place in a fully mature planetary system.”
Writing in the Astrophysical Journal, the team at UCLA, Tennessee State University and the California Institute of Technology said it spotted the dust orbiting a star known as BD +20 307, 300 light-years from Earth in the constellation Aries.
A light-year is the distance light travels in a year, or about 6 trillion miles. So the observations are, in essence, looking back in time 300 years.
“If any life was present on either planet, the massive collision would have wiped out everything in a matter of minutes: the ultimate extinction event,” said Gregory Henry of Tennessee State University.
BD +20 307 appears to be composed of two stars, both very similar in mass, temperature and size to the