Hubble Reveals Cosmic Bat Shadow In The Serpent’s Tail

MessageToEagle.com – In the star-forming region known as the Serpens Nebula, 1300 light-years from Earth, vast shadows created by the light from a young star passing through a ring of rock, debris, ice and dust creates a shape that evokes the symbol of Gotham’s famous crime-fighter.

In a stellar nursery called the Serpens Nebula, nearly 1,300 light-years away, a young star’s game of shadow play is revealing secrets of its unseen planet-forming disk.

Named HBC 672, this Sun-like star is surrounded by a debris ring of dust, rock, and ice—a disk that is too small and too distant to be seen, even by Hubble. But like a little fly that wanders into the beam of a flashlight shining on a wall, its shadow is projected large upon the cloud in which it was born.

In this Hubble image, the feature—nicknamed the “Bat Shadow”—spans approximately 200 times the length of our solar system. It is visible in the upper right portion of the picture.

“This is an analog of what the solar system looked like when it was only 1 or 2 million years old,”  Klaus Pontoppidan, an astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Baltimore, Maryland, said in a press release. “For all we know, the solar system once created a shadow like this.”

The near-infrared vision of NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope captured the shadow cast by the fledgling star’s brilliant light being blocked by this disk. The shadow is an example of what the future James Webb Space Telescope will be capable of studying in even greater depth. “Webb’s power lies in its ability to see into the dust and gas of these disks to understand the material that comprises these environments that form planets,” explained scientist Alexandra Lockwood of STScI.

Read more – here

MessageToEagle.com