In a stellar nursery called the Serpens Nebula, nearly 1,300 light-years away, a young star’s game of shadow play is revealing secrets of its unseen planet-forming disk.
Named HBC 672, this Sun-like star is surrounded by a debris ring of dust, rock, and ice—a disk.
It looks like a little fly that wanders into the beam of a flashlight shining on a wall.
Nicknamed the “Bat Shadow”—spans approximately 200 times the length of our solar system.
Klaus Pontoppidan, an astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Baltimore, explained this phenomenon as an analog of what the solar system looked like when it was only 1 or 2 million years old.
Thank You.
“This is an analog of what the solar system looked like when it was only 1 or 2 million years old,” explained Klaus Pontoppidan, an astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Baltimore, Maryland. “For all we know, the solar system once created a shadow like this.”
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