Free Astronomy Magazine January-February 2020

29 JANUARY-FEBRUARY 2020 EXOPLANETS Alycia Weinberger (Carnegie Institution of Washington) and other researchers, whose results were published in The Astrophysical Journal . Here is what the authors write in their scientific paper: “Typi- cal debris d i sks suited to the scenario of a catastrophic plan- etary collision, whose fragments would con- tinue to impact each other at each orbit, thereby increasing the amount of debris and dust. Heated by the pair of stars, this material would be directly responsible for the increased flow of infrared radiation, and only when the average size of the dust particles becomes so small as to make their heating negligible can we expect a decline in infrared light. Data collected by SOFIA have merged into a study on BD +20 307 by Maggie Thompson (University of California, Santa Cruz), B eside, the focal plane of the telescope, where the scientific in- struments are placed. In the rightmost picture, you can see the Faint Object In- frared Camera used to investigate the dust of BD +20 307. [DLR/NASA]