NASA's Spitzer Detects Comet Storm In Nearby Solar System

[Gerdih]

PASADENA, Calif. -- NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope has detected signs of icy bodies raining down in an alien solar system. The downpour resembles our own solar system several billion years ago during a period known as the "Late Heavy Bombardment," which may have brought water and other life-forming ingredients to Earth.

Now Spitzer has spotted a band of dust around a nearby bright star in the northern sky called Eta Corvi that strongly matches the contents of an obliterated giant comet. This dust is located close enough to Eta Corvi that Earth-like worlds could exist, suggesting a collision took place between a planet and one or more comets. The Eta Corvi system is approximately one billion years old, which researchers think is about the right age for such a hailstorm.

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/spitzer/news/spitzer20111019.html

 

[Notebook]

Astronomers have been able to test key consequences of Einstein's theories by studying the way a couple of black holes move around each other.
One of these objects is a true colossus - a hole weighing 18 billion times the mass of our Sun; the other not quite so big at "only" 150 million Sun masses.
Scientists managed to predict their interactions very precisely.
They did so by including their warping effects on space-time and by assuming the larger hole had a smooth "surface".
The black hole pairing, known as OJ 287, exists about 3.5 billion light-years from Earth.

The event was captured by the US space agency Nasa's Spitzer infrared telescope, a fortunate observation, as it turned out, because OJ 287 was on the far side of the Sun to the Earth at the time and therefore out of sight to ground-based facilities.
Spitzer's separation from Earth (160 million km), on the other hand, put it in prime position.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-52464250