Vanishing space dust baffles scientists (+video)

The case of the disappearing disk

The amount of dust around a star rises and falls over time. After a star forms, young planets are created from the leftover debris, known as a protoplanetary disk.

But the early life of a solar system is typically a time of violent collisions, so while much of the dust is initially swept up in the creation process, the disk is repopulated as large chunks of rock crash into one other. The disk around the 10-million-year-old star was thought to be in this second stage, with rocky objects constantly smashing together.

Where did the dust disappear to so quickly? Two different theories have been advanced to explain what caused the sudden loss.

The first model suggests that the dust fell into the star, while the second proposes that the explosive impacts could have blown much of the dust completely out of the system.

The second theory, known as the collisional cascade model, would likely require time scales longer than two years to clear the dust from the system, researchers said.

But there's still a nagging mystery. Neither of the two theories clearly fits the evidence obtained by observations of TYC 8241 2652 1.

"A perplexing thing about this discovery is that we don't have a really satisfactory explanation to address what happened around this star," Melis said.

The findings were published online today (July 4) in the journal Nature.

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