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WASHINGTON (AP) – Astronomers may have caught a relatively close star nibbling at a planet or mini-planets
A NASA space telescope noticed that the star had suddenly been spotted. look strange last year. The Chandra X-Ray Observatory has 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 observed the little 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 scientist from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, says that he has never seen anything like it, the appellant "a lot stranger than we thought.
"We have never seen a star that has changed its abundance of iron like this," he says .
Guenther says that one possible explanation is that the star is eating a planet or 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 this has never been seen before, he said
"This could be an exciting discovery, but the evidence is circumstantial and not definitive ". says Avi Loeb of Harvard
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