Press release
116KB
june 25, 2020 - Hubble Telescope
Hubble Watches the “Flapping” of Cosmic Bat Shadow
The young star HBC 672 is known by its nickname of Bat Shadow because of its wing-like shadow feature. The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has now observed a curious “flapping” motion in the shadow of the star’s disc for the first time. The star resides in a stellar nursery called the Serpens Nebula, about 1300 light-years away.
The Hubble Space Telescope captured a striking observation of the fledgling star’s unseen, planet-forming disc in 2018. This disc casts a huge shadow across a more distant cloud in a star-forming region — like a fly wandering into the beam of a flashlight shining on a wall.
Now, astronomers have serendipitously observed the Bat Shadow’s “flapping”. This may have been caused by a planet pulling on the disc and warping it. “You have a star that is surrounded by a disc, and the disc is not like Saturn’s rings — it’s not flat. It’s puffed up. And so that means that the light from the star, if it goes straight up, can continue straight up — it’s not blocked by anything. But if it tries to go along the plane of the disc, it doesn’t get out, and it casts a shadow,” explained lead author Klaus Pontoppidan, an astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Baltimore, USA, whose team have published these results [1].
This “flapping” finding was also a surprise. Pontoppidan and his team observed the shadow in several filters over a period of 13 months. When they combined the old and new images, the shadow appeared to have moved.
The shadow is so large — about 200 times the diameter of our Solar System — that light doesn’t travel instantaneously across it. In fact, it takes about 45 days for the light to travel from the star out to the best defined edge of the shadow.
Pontoppidan and his team calculate that a planet warping the disc would orbit its star in no fewer than 180 days. They estimate that it would be about the same distance from its star as Earth is from the Sun. Pontoppidan’s team also suggest the disc must be flared, with an angle that increases with distance — like a trumpet. This shape of its two peaks and two dips would explain the “flapping” of the shadow. The team also speculates that a planet is embedded in the disc, inclined to the disc’s plane. If it’s not a planet, a less likely explanation is a lower-mass stellar companion orbiting HBC 672 outside the plane of the disc. Pontoppidan and his team doubt this is the case, based on the thickness of the disc. There is also no current evidence for a binary companion.
The disc is a circling structure of gas, dust, and rock, and is too small and too distant to be seen, even by Hubble. However, based on the projected shadow, scientists do know that its height-to-radius ratio is 1:5.
Notes
[1] The team’s paper appears in an upcoming edition of the Astrophysical Journal.
More information
The Hubble Space Telescope is a project of international cooperation between ESA and NASA.
The international team of astronomers in this study consists of K. Pontoppidan, J. Green, T. Pauly, C. Salyk, and J. DePasquale.
These observations were conducted under Hubble observation programmes SNAP 14181 (PI: T. Megeath) and GO 15597 (M. Mutchler).
Image credit: NASA, ESA, K. Pontoppidan
heic1819b
700x674, 39KB
heic1819c
700x683, 125KB
heic2012a
700x620, 47KB
Related news |
||
|
|
|
july 20, 2023
|
february 11, 2021
|
december 04, 2020
|
|
Astronomers using the NASA/ESA/ Hubble Space Telescope’s extraordinary sensitivity have discovered a swarm of boulders that were p... |
Scientists were expecting to find an intermediate-mass black hole at the heart of the globular cluster NGC 6397, but instead they ... |
Press release available only in original language. Astronomers have caught a rare glimpse of a rapidly fading shroud of gas around... |
Download all 
You might be interested in |
||
|
|
|
september 18, 2020
|
september 11, 2020
|
august 24, 2020
|
|
This latest image of Jupiter, taken by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope on 25 August 2020, was captured when the planet was 653... |
Observations by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope and the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile ha... |
The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has captured the closest images yet of the sky’s latest visitor to make the headlines, comet C... |
Italian 
Download all 
Share
Share via mail 
Automotive
Sport
Events
Art&Culture
Design
Fashion&Beauty
Food&Hospitality
Technology
Nautica
Racing
Excellence
Corporate
OffBeat
Green
Gift
Pop
Heritage
Entertainment
Health & Wellness