NASA could have witnessed the moment a star devoured a planet

About 450 light-years from Earth, a young star has just feasted on the size of a planet.

At least that is what the astronomy team thinks with RW Aur A, a star of a few million years that astronomers have studied since 1937.

In stellar terms, "a few million years" make RW Aur A a very young star, which allowed us to discover the interaction between stars and planets in their early stages of development. Over the last 80 years, RW Aur A's light is periodically dimmed "every few decades, for about a month," according to NASA.

However, since 2011, light has been attenuated more frequently and over longer periods. A team of researchers led Chandra's X-ray observatory on the star for five years to better understand what exactly was happening to him.

The Chandra Space Telescope, launched in 1999, is extremely sensitive and can detect the intensity of X-rays emitted by the young star. Normally, young stars such as RW Aur A are surrounded by thick discs of detritus and gas, which changes the intensity of X-rays emitted by the star. By allowing Chandra to observe RW Aur A, it was possible to obtain information that helped scientists decipher what type of material is the one that forms the discs.

According to the results published in The Astronomical Journal on July 18 show that Chandra was able to detect iron in abundance around RW Aur A. Previous inspections did not show any such iron levels, so the research team had to develop a hypothesis about the origin of this material.

Your explanation? A collision of planets.

The team speculates that the origin of this plentiful iron is a planet – or planetary – that collided with another space around RW Aur A. If one of the planets was rich in iron, the collision could have caused iron to be thrown into space, enriching the crown of the hungry young star, and thus castrating the abundance of this material that they discovered

"If our interpretation of the information is correct, this could be the case – the first time we directly observe a young star devouring one or more planets," says Hans Guenther, who led the study of the Kavli Institute of Astrophysics and Space Research at MIT

Also, there is a possibility that the stellar pair of RW Aur A – that is, RW Aur B – may have passed so close that it has removed The next step will be to study how the RW Aur A X-ray emissions will change over time, which will provide clues to infer the type of planetary collision that it is produced or may reveal a totally different new cause of why these iron abnormalities were detected.

But, of course, this would not be as exciting as a global clash.