Recently, one of the critical moments of a star in the extinction phase was observed for the first time in history. A star that turned into a red giant 12 thousand light years away, swallowed its own planet in the process.
Those moments, whose data were captured, showed the fate of our Sun and Earth 5 billion years later. Today, scientists have made a new discovery that points to what the Solar System looked like before there was a single planet.
The discovery in 2017 was repeated:
In 2017, scientists observed an interesting shadow in a round structure made of gas and dust in data obtained thanks to the Hubble Space Telescope. This shadow was located around the red giant stage star TW Hydrae, one of the last stages in the death of stars.
The most accepted explanation for this shadow was that it belonged to an unseen planet. The planet’s gravity pulled dust and gas into its orbit, forming its own disk, shading the disk around the star.
A second shadow was spotted on the same system recently:
Scientists examining Hubble’s data for June 6, 2021, came across a second shadow around the same star that appeared only a few years apart. Scientists stated that this shadow also belongs to the disk of a different invisible planet.
What do you mean by ‘invisible’ planet?
Yes, there is no planet in the middle. The structures whose shadows have been discovered are just a disk of dust and gas revolving around a center of gravity. This disk will create planets that we cannot see today but will see in the next few hundred thousand years.
In the text published by the European Space Agency, it was stated that the distance of both planets to the star is similar to the distance between Jupiter and the Sun. It was also calculated that the shadow structures complete their orbit around the star in 15 years.
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