The peculiar shadow of a rising star’s planetary formation disk earned that nickname in 2018 for its resemblance to that animal’s wings.
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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 the light from the star takes between 40 and 45 days in traveling 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 directly upward, it can continue because nothing blocks it. But if try to pass through the disk plane, it can’t 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. NASA team observed shadow flapping for 404 days and argues that this phenomenon could be due to the attraction it exerts a planet 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 to them, suggests that instead of a planet there could be a stellar couple of less mass which orbits HBC 672 out of the plane of the disk, causing it to ‘wobble’ over the shadowed disk.
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