EARTH'S DUST TAIL
February 22nd 2011 02:02
Category: Astronomy
This Hubble Space Telescope view of the star Beta Pictoris clearly shows a primary dust disk and a much fainter secondary dust diskAstronomers used the Advanced Camera's coronagraph to block out the light from the bright star. The black circle in the center of the image marks the coronagraphic mask. The colorful spike-like features and the speckled background are artifacts of the image processing which removed the residual starlight. The color image reveals that the disk is slightly red. The disk appeared gray in previous images taken by ground-based telescopes. Though astronomers are not sure why the disk is red, they think it is due to compact or fluffy grains of graphite and silicates, which may be as small as smoke particles.
In my previous blog I wrote about planet Mercury having a tail. I did receive a question as to whether other planets exhibited tails.
I guess we need to define what is a tail and what is just a matter of trailing debris form the remnants of planet material.
Most planets do not have a tail similar to what appears form a trailing comet. Mercury falls in a slightly different category, Mercury has an extremely tenuous atmosphere coupled with being in close proximity to the sun.
The sheer force of the sun’s radiation and solar wind stripes away at the Mercury’s atmosphere causing it to stream into a long tail much like comet in fact the same effect from the sun can melt the icy exterior of a comet at a much larger distance form the sun.
The Earth’s tail if you will is not technically a “tail” although it does have a dust trail.
Planets in different galaxies that have solar systems probably have similar dust tails.
In the future astronomers will use these dust trails to find distant planets orbiting distant suns.
Dust trail will be an important tool in future distant planet hunting.
A dust tail like Earth's could produce a bigger signal than a planet does.
The dust trail can encompass the entire orbit of a planet, the dust trail itself is the left over material after the formation of a planet.
It’s a bit like finding the titanic you know its somewhere down in the ocean but is too small to be seen by just taking a wide angle image of the sea floor. The titanic was found by careful plotting and finding a debris field at the bottom of the ocean that ultimately lead to the discovery of the ship.
In astronomy researchers will use the dust trail as the debris field to locate a distant planet.
The planet is difficult to spot on it’s own but with a large debris field it is easier to pinpoint the existence and location of a distant planet. Astronomers will be able to track a distant planet by the “footprint” it leaves in the dust trail.
Hubble image
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