Possible planet indulging in 'shadow play' is Hubble's latest discovery!

Image courtesy: NASA, ESA, and J. Debes (STScI)

New Delhi: Scientists' search for planets lurking around in deep space near other stars has given birth to fascinating discoveries.

Being a tricky business, however, this search has often been pretty time consuming because there are planets that are so small and faint that they are sometimes impossible to find.

However, in what could be a breakthrough discovery, scientists at NASA have spotted what could potentially be a planet that gave it's position away in a unique manner - by a shadow that is sweeping across the face of a vast pancake-shaped gas-and-dust disk surrounding a young star.

The shadow isn't being cast by the planet itself, but it is gravitationally pulling on material near the star and warping the inner part of the disk. The twisted, misaligned inner disk is casting its shadow across the surface of the outer disk.

According to NASA, A team of astronomers led by John Debes of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Maryland say this scenario is the most plausible explanation for the shadow they spotted in the stellar system TW Hydrae, located 192 light-years away in the constellation Hydra, also known as the Female Water Snake.

The star is roughly 8 million years old and slightly less massive than our sun. Debes’ team uncovered the phenomenon while analyzing 18 years’ worth of archival observations taken by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope.

“This is the very first disk where we have so many images over such a long period of time, therefore allowing us to see this interesting effect,” Debes said. “That gives us hope that this shadow phenomenon may be fairly common in young stellar systems.”

A brightness in the disk that changed with position became the first evidence of the phenomenon for Debes.

Astronomers using Hubble’s Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph (STIS) first noted this brightness asymmetry in 2005. But they had only one set of observations, and could not make a definitive determination about the nature of the mystery feature.

Debes concluded that whatever was making the shadow must be deep inside the 41-billion-mile-wide disk, so close to the star it cannot be imaged by Hubble or any other present-day telescope.

Searching the archive, Debes’ team put together six images from several different epochs. The observations were made by STIS and by the Hubble's Near Infrared Camera and Multi-Object Spectrometer (NICMOS), NASA reported.

Check out NASA's tweet below!

.@NASA_Hubble may have found a planet by a shadow that's sweeping across a disk of gas & dust around a star: https://t.co/o59PYDI9Rf pic.twitter.com/RzMMz5F0ot

— NASA (@NASA) January 9, 2017