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Astronomers may have caught a relatively close star nibbling at a planet or mini-planets.
A NASA space telescope noticed that the star suddenly looked a little strange last year. The observatory Chandra X-Ray spotted a 30-fold increase in iron on the edge of the star, which is only 10 million years old, with high attenuation.
Astronomers have been observing the baby's star in the Taurus constellation for decades and iron levels were not high in 2015 the last time the Chandra Telescope looked at it. The star, called RW Aur A, is 450 light-years away. "We have never seen a star that has changed its abundance of iron like that," he said.
Guenther said that one possible explanation is that the star eats a planet or a planet. mini-planets. He looked at other possible explanations, and of the two that make sense, he prefers the planet-nibbling. Computer simulations show that this can happen, but it has never been seen before, he said.
External experts are wary.
"This could be an exciting discovery, but the evidence is circumstantial and not definitive" Loeb.
Guenther's favorite explanation is speculative, said Alan Boss of the Carnegie Institution of Science, an expert on planets outside our solar system.
The study was published in the Astronomical Journal. that the star suddenly started to look a little strange last year. The observatory Chandra X-Ray spotted a 30-fold increase in iron on the edge of the star, which is only 10 million years old, with pronounced gradation.
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