Lapatilla
NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has captured a never-before-seen unique image of the flapping of the ‘Shadow of the Bat’, nickname given by astronomers to the huge shadow cast by a planetary formation disk of the rising star HBC 672, located in a stellar nursery called the Serpens Nebula, about 1,400 light-years away.
The shadow is about 200 times the length of our solar system, and it takes 40 to 45 days for the star’s light to travel to its edge. In cosmic terms, HBC 672 is considered young, being only one or two million years old.
“You have a star surrounded by a disk, but that disk is not like Saturn’s rings, it is not flat. It is bulky. This means that if the light from the star goes straight up, it can go on because nothing is blocking it. But if you try to pass through the plane of the disk, you cannot get out and cast a shadow, “explained Klaus Pontoppidan, lead author of the research and astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Baltimore, USA.
The disk consists of gas, dust, and rock and is too small and distant, making observation difficult even for Hubble. The NASA team observed the flapping of the shadow for 404 days and maintains that this phenomenon could be due to the attraction that a planet exerts on the disk, deforming it. The planet could be embedded in the disk, with its orbit tilted toward the plane of the disk, astronomers estimate.
Another hypothesis from scientists, which seems less likely, suggests that instead of a planet there could be a lower-mass stellar pair that orbits HBC 672 out of the plane of the disk, causing its ‘oscillation’ on the shaded disk.
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