Thread by @weatherindia

.@NASA’s Hubble Telescope Spots Cosmic ‘Bat Wings’ Flapping in Distant Stellar Nursery

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#HubbleTelescope

📸 : (NASA, ESA, and STScI)

By @kun5k

These striking scenes were created by a disk near an emerging star casting its shadow across a cloud within the star-forming region.

The shadow in question belongs to a saddle-shaped disk that surrounds a young star named HBC 672. It is only one or two million years old, which is young in cosmic terms, and resides in a stellar nursery called the Serpens Nebula, about 1,400 light-years away from the Earth.

The entire casting-of-the-shadow phenomenon is similar to a lamp with a shade that casts a shadow on the wall—only in this case, the lightbulb is the HBC 672 star, the lampshade is the disk, and the distant cloud is the wall.

The shadow is ginormous—about 200 times the length of our solar system. Therefore, the light takes about 40 to 45 days to travel from the star to the perceivable edge of the shadow.

Pontoppidan and his team witnessed the “flapping of the wings” over a span of 404 days. The “flapping” visuals are most likely being caused by a planet embedded within the disc, whose gravity is pulling and warping the disk, he adds.

The research team calculated that this planet warping the disk would orbit its star in no fewer than 180 days. They also estimate that this planet would be located at the same distance from its star as the Earth is from the Sun.

The phenomenon was initially attributed to an error in image processing, but the researchers quickly realised the images were indeed properly aligned, and the flapping of the wings was real.