Bharat SainiLast Updated on May 7, 2018 by Bharat Saini
Giant Alien Planet may be lurking inside, “A huge, complicated dust structure 150 billion miles across that surrounds the young star HR 4796A”, which has been discovered by the astronomers by using NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope. A bright, narrow, inner ring of dust is already known to encircle the star and may have been corralled by the gravitational pull of an unseen giant planet. NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration of USA) Scientists suspect that a giant planet is also embedded inside of the debris, and so the structure could shed insights into how planets are formed. This newly discovered huge structure around the system may have implications for what this yet-unseen planetary system looks like around the 8-million-year-old star, which is in its formative years of planet construction. This work has been detailed in The Astronomical Journal in February, 2018.
NASA officials stated that this is the Strangest Alien Planet, they have found so far and said, “The debris field of very fine dust was likely created from collisions among developing infant planets near the star, evidenced by a bright ring of dusty debris seen seven billion miles (11 billion kilometres) from the star. The pressure of starlight from the star, which is 23 times more luminous than the sun, then expelled the dust far into space.”
NASA describes that there are strange subtleties to the dust ring’s structure because the dust is much more extended on one side of the star than it is on the other side. Perhaps, scientists suggest, the host star is ploughing through the gas that makes up the interstellar medium, creating a shock wave that is affecting the dust. Or, the star’s red dwarf binary companion, HR 4796B, which is roughly 54 billion miles (87 billion km) away, is exerting a tidal influence.
Glenn Schneider of the University of Arizona, Tucson, lead researcher and astronomer, used Hubble’s Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph to examine the dust in more detail and stated, “The dust distribution is a tell-tale sign of how dynamically interactive the inner system containing the ring is”. He added, “We cannot treat exoplanetary debris systems as simply being in isolation”. “Environmental effects, such as interactions with the interstellar medium and forces due to stellar companions, may have long-term implications for the evolution of such systems. The gross asymmetries of the outer dust field are telling us there are a lot of forces in play — beyond just host-star radiation pressure — that are moving the material around. We’ve seen effects like this in a few other systems, but here’s a case where we see a bunch of things going on at once.”
About 40 debris disks have been photographed around stars to date, mostly through Hubble observations. Evidence of the first debris disk around a star (Beta Pictoris) was discovered in 1983, using NASA’s Infrared Astronomical Satellite. In 2015, NASA officials said Beta Pictoris was the only known system that has a gas giant planet embedded in the dust.
