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This illustration provided by NASA shows debris surrounding the RW Aur A star, about 450 light-years from Earth. (Mr. Weiss / CXC / NASA via AP)
Astronomers may have caught a relatively close star nibbling at a planet or mini-planets.
A NASA space telescope noticed that the star suddenly started looking a bit 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. Hans Moritz Guenther, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology scientist, says he's never seen anything like it, calling him "a lot 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; 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 published in the Astronomical Journal of [19659006] ___
Associated Press Health & Science Department Receives it supports the Department of Science Education of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
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