There are a lot of unexplained objects out there in the Universe, and astronomers have just found another one – a strange, dusty object that may be causing its host star to dim by up to 75 percent.
. But after looking back through six years of data on the mysterious object, the team found that something strange is going on.Firstly, TIC 400799224 isn't orbiting a single star system.
"The nature of the orbiting body itself is puzzling because the quantity of dust emitted is large; if it were produced by the disintegration of an object like the asteroid Ceres in our Solar System, it would survive only about eight thousand years before disappearing," a press release from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics"Yet remarkably, over the six years that this object has been observed, the periodicity has remained strict and the object emitting theIt's...
The team also looked into three possible explanations for the weird dust in their study: 1. disintegration of an object as it passes directly from a solid into a gas state ; 2. collisions with a minor planet-like object releasing sporadic dust clouds; and 3. dust being shepherded by a planet embedded in the star's disk.
The most likely explanation, the team concludes, is the second one – that some planet-like object is colliding around the star and blasting off a whole lot of dust every time it does. This could help explain the regular periodicity of the dust cloud and also the variation in depths.
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