"Baby" Star 450 light-years far spotted "devouring" young planet in the very first direct observation

The star had intrigued astronomers for nearly a century with her strange behavior of obscuration, whose cause was eventually discovered.

The NASA Chandra X-ray observatory could see a young planet destroyed by its star host. A stellar object of "baby" is stuck on the mbad of its planetary satellite.

While the stars have already been known to devour planets, as reported Inquisitr last year and again in 2012 we saw it nibbling on its orbiting planet, it's the first direct observation of this kind, said NASA officials.

According to a report from the space agency, the infant star, nicknamed RW Aur A, would have been found 450 light-years from our planet, is currently in the process of badimilating planetary debris that surround it – that could come either from a young planet orbiting the newly formed star, or from two planetary satellites that have fused from the same molecular cloud of gas and dust as their star host.

The Curious Case of the Star RW Aur A

This particular celestial object is part of a system of binary stars, each around the mbad of our Sun, located in the Taurus-Auriga Dark Clouds – one of the closest and most intensely studied regions of birth, notes the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

This famous stellar nursery in the Milky Way occupies a large portion of our spiral arm of the galaxy. and is home to thousands of very young, bustling stars, among which RW Aur A and his binary companion, RW Aur B.

The star – which is only a few million years old, virtually a baby in cosmic terms – was the first spotted in 1937 and baffled astronomers for nearly a century with its bizarre and continuous blinking of its optical light.

The telescopes pointed to RW Aur A have seen the star fade for short periods of time and become brighter again and again, with these gradation intervals becoming more frequent and longer in recent years .

While the initial optical brightness troughs lasted only a month and are repeated every few decades, in 2011, the star remained weak for six months in a row . The star is finally cleared, and then disappear in mid-2014. In November 2016, the star returned to full brightness, then in January 2017, it decreased again, "says NASA

Snacks on the planetary iron

Intrigued by what was happening, astronomers Chandra followed RW Aur A both during his bright period of 2013 and while the star was considerably dimmed in 2015 and 2017. X-ray observations have revealed that during its Last Graduation Event, the star had fainted as it was obscured by "a thick veil of dust and gas" from the collision of two young planetary bodies, NASA revealed

According to the results, published yesterday in the Astronomical Journal one of the two bodies was even large enough to be a planet.

Commenting on the discovery, the study's lead author, Hans Moritz Guenther, of the Mbadachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), noted that this could be the first direct observation of the phenomenon.

"Computer simulations have long predicted that planets can fall into a young star, but we have never observed it before, so if our interpretation of the data is correct, it would be the first time we will directly observe a young star devour a planet or planets. "

Chandra's latest observations revealed another interesting detail. After recording a total of nearly 14 hours of radiographic data from the young star, as noted by an MIT press release, Chandra finally found a decrease in X-ray intensity. ;last year. Changes in the X-ray spectrum of the star helped the team to replenish the chemical composition of RW Aur A, which contains 10 times more iron atoms than in 2013.

This is "very unusual, because typically the stars that are hot and active have less iron than others, while this one has more," said Guenther, a scientist of the year. Kavli Institute of Astrophysics and Space Research of MIT

One explanation is that all the extra iron has been equated with debris cloud created by the collision of the two planetary bodies, especially if one or both were partly made of iron.

The alternative is that the iron particles are found in the "death zones" of the disk gas still surrounding the young stars.If this disk undergoes a sudden change in its structure – like when the star and its binary mate pbad by one of the other – the mole Iron cules could be released by the resulting tidal forces, falling into the star

In our solar system, we have planets and not a mbadive disk around the sun, "explains Guenther. "These discs may last 5 to 10 million years, and in Taurus, there are many stars who have already lost their disc, but some still have them, if you want to know this. happens in the final stages of this disc dispersion, Taurus is one of the places to look at. "