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.
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While searching for life in the Gulf of Mexico, researchers pulled out a new bizarre-looking species of isopod, whose head resembles the Darth Vader from Star Wars!
This new-found crustacean, named Bathonymus yucatanensis, has 14 legs and is around 26 cm long — approximately 25 times larger than its closest relative, the common woodlouse.
While these blonde creatures seem pretty scary, the "Vanilla Vaders" are, in fact, harmless to humans.
Their huge size is only due to deep-sea gigantism — a phenomenon wherein ocean dwellers grow bigger than their terrestrial relatives due to lack of sunlight.
This super-Earth is a rocky world, on which a year is equal to just 11 Earth days.
The short orbit is down to the red dwarfs being a lot smaller than the Sun that centres our solar system. But the smaller sizes also make their gravitational fields less expansive than the Sun's.
Therefore, Ross 508b revolves around its red dwarf at a distance of just 5 million km. Mercury, in comparison, is about 60 million km from the Sun.
The short distance between this super-Earth & its red dwarf begs the question: how could it possibly be habitable?
#Japan is making grand plans of creating interplanetary #trains and champagne flute-like glass habitats in its bid to send and host humans on the #Moon and #Mars!
An interplanetary transportation system dubbed the 'Hexatrack', which maintains a gravity of 1G during long-distance travel to mitigate the effects of prolonged exposure to low gravity, has been proposed by #Japanese researchers.
The #trains will also possess 'Hexacapsules', which are essentially hexagon-shaped capsules with a moving device in the middle.
In 2012, the almost-complete skeleton of a new kind of #dinosaur was found in the northern Patagonia region of #Argentina.
The dinosaur has been christened #Meraxes gigas. The generic epithet is an ode to a dragon in the #GameOfThrones series.
Standing at the height of 11 m (36 ft) and weighing roughly 4000 kgs, the #dinosaur sported several crests, bumps and horns on its skull, which lent it a menacing appearance.
But the highlight of the findings is that the dinosaur had teeny-tiny arms, just like the #Trex!
Dr Jose, along with an international research team from the US, UK and Australia, will be examining the Galactic Centre Cloud (GCC) — the central molecular zone of our Milky Way — in April 2023.
They have been allotted 27.3 hours over the access period of 12 months.