Were they? Don't be draw in by the ""Photo"" it is only an artists depiction.

Seems they were indeed. This is in today's Astronomy Photo of the Day, and they talk about Earth / Venus-sized planets there.

As far as I understood, if the bodies were smaller they'd never generate that much dust. That's what that team's interpretation of the data is, anyway. There could be others.

And, BTW, that's a good artist's illustration for a change, even with all that back-lighting coming from nowhere.

It would suck to find out that the a planet was inhabited, but just got blasted apart.

Then again, if there were intelligent being there, they might have realized their fate, and decided to leave or just sent out a message.

Regardless, it wouldn't hurt to check out different EM frequencies…just in case.

Were they? Don't be draw in by the ""Photo"" it is only an artists depiction.

those are obviously ball-lightning style photon torpedos, just in case the moon-drop doesn't do in the planet.

is it too late to rename BD 20 307 to
Alderaan?

Excellent point. This is clearly the work of the Destroyers who are diligent in wiping out all life forms they encounter by destroying the planet they live on.

Soon the Destroyers will be noticing the EM transmissions from Earth or just sniffing our atmosphere and seeing a habitable biosphere, and some day some astronomers elsewhere will be marvelling at the dust cloud in our solar system..

[A Sun-like binary star system. What are those two yellow objects in the illustration's background? ]

Any change a billion years of gravity waves from this dance couple could trigger some orbital problems?

KEEP UP WITH THE GREAT JOB, CONGRATS !!!

The other thought is whether this system harbours anymore exoplanets? Is there a way of detecting them…if so, r they in a stable configuration or are they going to give us a spectacle in near future like Levy -9????

http://arxiv.org/abs/0804.1799

If you read it, you'll find out that the calculations suggest that the stars are orbiting each other with a semi major axis of 4.4 – 4.7 Million km. This is .029-.031 AU or 9 stellar radii to put this in perspective, mercury has a semi major axis of 57 Million km or 0.387 AU.

In otherwords, if this binary system were within the place of the sun, you'd have two solar masses worth of material within a radius of 9 solar radii.

The difference in tidal effects between that and a two mass sun is going to be nothing, or next to nothing.

In fact, most planetary scientests will tell you that the only way planets can form in a binary system is if it happens to be a close binary like this, or a paricularly widely space system.

Perhaps binary planets with degrading orbits? Similar to the Earth and the Moon if the moon were scooting closer to earth a little each year. It could take a very long time for it to finally reach the point where the two objects collide aye?

That won't happen. As the two objects get closer, they reach a point, called Roche limit, where the less heavy of the two is torn apart by tidal forces from the other. You get a ring, and probably a long bombardment on the surviving planet by small(ish) fragments of the smaller body, not a collision. That might send some dust into the interplanetary space, I guess, but nothing comparable to a smack on collision.

I'd imagine that'd make for less stable orbits.

When a star is a binary you're a bit more limited in the areas where your orbits are stable, but you can have stable orbits in almost any configuration. You'd just need to have your orbiting bodies either close enough to one of the stars or distant enough from both that any disturbances it suffers aren't serious and cancel out in the long run. Or if it's in resonance.

Take the Pluto system for an example: you have two large bodies in a double system, Pluto and Charon, and yet you have stable orbits for Hydra and Nix, not all that far away from "mom and "dad" .

seriously though, its really neat they're able to determine that kind of thing.

Or maybe it's two solar systems on a collision course, now ~that~ would be dramatic.

Oh, wait: they didn't orbit the Sun, so they weren't dwarf planets either. They were… er…

Er…

OK, let's try again. Forget the IAU and its silly-silly-übersilly definition. They were obviously big enough to have been rounded by their own gravity? Yes? Allright: you can call them planets. Problem solved.