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WASHINGTON – Astronomers may have caught a relatively close star nibbling on 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 observed the baby's star – in the constellation Taurus – 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. A light year is 5.9 trillion miles.
Hans Moritz Guenther, a scientist at the Mbadachusetts Institute of Technology, said he had never seen anything like it, calling it "much stranger than we thought. "
" We have never seen a star that changed its abundance of iron like this, "he said.
Guenther said that a simple potential explanation is that the star eats a planet or mini-planets He has 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 that n & # 39; 39, has never been seen before, he said.
External experts mistrust.
"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 is in the Astronomical Journal this month .] / *
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