Shadows flickering across the dust roiling around a newborn star have revealed a rare glimpse of how the Solar System may have formed billions of years ago.
Changing light around a star named TW Hydrae suggests that the giant disks of material circling the star are off-kilter, orbiting at slightly different angles of inclination.
It's still gaining mass and contracting down as it does so since gravity binds the star more closely as it grows. It's about 60 percent of the Sun's mass but has a slightly larger radius than the Sun. Indeed, TW Hydrae is thought to look a lot like the Sun did when it was a newborn.As stars form, they slurp up dust and gas from the space around them. This material arranges into a disk that swirls around the star, feeding onto it from the inner rim.
In 2021, astronomers turned Hubble back to TW Hydrae for more observations. And this is where things got a little hinky."When I first looked at the data, I thought something had gone wrong with the observation because it wasn't what I was expecting. I was flummoxed at first, and all my collaborators were like: what is going on? We really had to scratch our heads, and it took us a while to actually figure out an explanation.
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