Planet Eater

17
October 2018

Planet Eater

Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), the world’s leader in exact sciences and technology, shared some of its astronomers’ recent new discoveries. For many years, the area between the constellations of Taurus and Auriga has been monitored at the Chandra NASA space observatory. Scientists call this area, located 450 light years from Earth, a star cradle. New bright formations often emerge in the cluster of molecular clouds.

Scientists were able to create a computer model of the process of forming planets from gas and interstellar dust. The center of the cloud, compressed by gravity, condenses and heats up. As a result, a core is formed, around which a unidirectional movement begins, forming a flattened disk. It is from the latter that the planets are gradually formed. But, as it turned out, not all of them are destined to develop further.

Hans Moritz Gunter, who leads the project, believes that his team is about to understand the reasons for the survival of the planetary “young.” “Computer modeling has long predicted that planets may fall into a young star. But we had never been able to see this. This is the first time that we could watch a young star devouring a planet”, he said.

The celestial body that caught the astronomers’ interest changed its brightness several times during the observations. Later it turned out that in the composition of this object iron turned out to be an order of magnitude higher than the average indicators. The researchers easily explained the riddle: the growing star “ate” its closest satellite. "C'est La Vie," as the French say.

In recent years, astronomers have discovered several thousand exoplanets. Most of them were gas giants, but some were stony celestial bodies, 2-3 times larger than the Earth. For a long time, scientists could not understand how the second type was formed and believed that this required some exotic conditions.

According to current concepts, the star and its planets are formed from a collapsing cloud of dust and gas. This cloud is inside a larger cloud called a nebula. Shrinking under the influence of gravity, the center of the cloud becomes more and more dense and hot. As a result, it turns into the core of a new star. The matter of the cloud, meanwhile, begins to move, rotating in one direction and gradually forming a flattened protoplanetary disk. Planets of a new star are gradually formed from it.

“Currently, much attention is paid to the study of exoplanets and how they are formed,” says Günther, “therefore it is very important to see how young planets can be destroyed in interaction with host stars and other young planets, and what factors determine their survival".

Some experts are more skeptical: they believe that the evidence is too circumstantial to be taken as conclusive evidence. Further observations should supply new data.

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