Credits: NASA, ESA and STScI.
Scientists named the young star HBC 672 and called the shadow function ‘Bat Shadow’. According to NASA, the team of scientists witnessed the flapping for 404 days.
- Trends Desk
- Last update: June 27, 2020 7:40 PM IST
NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has always sent amazing images of celestial bodies and astronomical events to Earth.
This time, he has provided a photo of the invisible planet-forming disk of a bridal star casting a huge shadow through a more distant cloud in a star-forming region.
The image looked like a cosmic pair of flapping bat wings.
Scientists named the young star HBC 672 and called the shadow function “Bat Shadow”. According to NASA, the team of scientists witnessed the flapping for 404 days.
Explaining the reason behind the formation of the bat’s shadow, Klaus Pontoppidan, an astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Baltimore, said that if the light from a star surrounded by a disk tries to go along the plane of the disc, it does not come out and cast a shadow.
Astronomers speculate that a planet is embedded in the disk that has an orbit tilted toward the plane of the disk.
“If there was a simple bump on the disk, we would expect both sides of the shadow to tilt in opposite directions, like the wings of an airplane during a turn,” said team member Colette Salyk of Vassar College in New York.
Shadow is said to be approximately 200 times the length of our solar system. It takes 40 to 45 days for light to travel from the star to the perceptible edge of the shadow.
Astronomers also revealed that “a planet that deforms the disk would orbit its star in no less than 180 days.”
They predicted that shadow motion could also have occurred due to a lower-mass stellar companion orbiting HBC 672 outside the plane of the disk.
Image magnification. 2020-06-24T19: 40: 50.000Z & Publish_max = 2020-06-27T19: 40: 50.000Z & sort_by = date-relevance & order_by = 0 & limit = 2
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