The picture on the left shows a second shadow that emerged from yet another nested disk at the 7:00 o'clock position, as photographed in 2021. This shadow is cast by an inner disk that is slightly inclined to the outer disk and so blocks starlight. The left image, taken in 2016, shows just one shadow at the 11:00 o'clock position. The disks are tilted face-on to Earth and so give astronomers a bird's-eye view of what's happening around the star. John Debes of AURA/STScI for the European Space Agency at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Maryland, compared the TW Hydrae disk to Hubble observations made several years ago.Ĭomparison images from the Hubble Space Telescope, taken several years apart, have uncovered two eerie shadows moving counterclockwise across a gas-and-dust disk encircling the young star TW Hydrae. The second shadow was discovered in observations obtained on June 6, 2021, as part of a multi-year program designed to track the shadows in circumstellar disks. Because the TW Hydrae system is tilted nearly face-on to our view from Earth, it is an optimum target for getting a bull's-eye-view of a planetary construction yard. In its infancy, our solar system may have resembled the TW Hydrae system, some 4.6 billion years ago. TW Hydrae is less than 10 million years old and resides about 200 light-years away. The two disks are likely evidence of a pair of planets under construction. This could be from yet another disk nestled inside the system. Now, a second shadow-playing a game of peek-a-boo-has emerged in just a few years between observations stored in Hubble's MAST archive. One explanation is that an unseen planet's gravity is pulling dust and gas into the planet's inclined orbit. The shadow isn't from a planet, but from an inner disk slightly inclined relative to the much larger outer disk-causing it to cast a shadow. In 2017, astronomers reported discovering a shadow sweeping across the face of a vast pancake-shaped gas-and-dust disk surrounding the red dwarf star.
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