NASA’s TESS exoplanet mission reveals dusty secret, puzzling astronomers
The universe is entire of mysteries.
In observations collected by NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), astronomers stumbled on still a different thriller, and a dusty 1 at that. In new exploration, a workforce of scientists examines likely brings about of odd alerts emitted by an object dubbed TIC 400799224.
Based mostly on what astronomers have found so considerably, the researchers propose that this item could possibly be a binary star, or double star program, in which a single of the stars is surrounded by a enormous cloud of dust, the rubble of probably a large asteroid, according to a statement from the Harvard-Smithsonian Heart for Astrophysics, property to one of the researchers on the crew.
Relevant: The 10 most significant exoplanet discoveries of 2021
TESS is created to location exoplanets by seeking for very small, rhythmic dips in the brightness of a star — dips brought on by a earth passing in involving the telescope and the star, blocking a smidge of its light. Even so, planets are not the only phenomenon that can bring about changing brightness like this, so TESS has gathered a bounty of observations on every thing from supernovas (exploding stars) to triple star methods and far more.
When the scientists had been searching via TESS details gathered in early 2019, TIC 400799224 stood out due to the fact it grew to become nearly 25% dimmer in just a couple hrs, then built numerous far more unexpected brightness alterations. (TIC stands for TESS Enter Catalog and references a database of “each and every optically persistent, stationary item in the sky,” by the way.)
TESS spends about a single thirty day period on a single patch of the sky then moves on, but these patches overlap, so the item was involved in 4 distinctive sectors observed involving March 2019 and May 2021. The scientists also turned to other instruments for more info on the odd item, incorporating info from amenities such as the All-Sky Automated Survey for Supernovae and the Las Cumbres Observatory, the two networks of ground-based mostly observatories close to the globe.
Taken with each other, all this facts permit researchers piece jointly a picture of what could possibly be producing the unusual signal. The scientists suspect that at the heart of TIC 400799224 is a binary star in which two similar stars circle each other. But a single of individuals stars seems to be pulsing just about every 19.77 days, leading to the extra challenging styles that pulsing, the astronomers argue, is prompted by a enormous cloud of dust surrounding the star. That dust has a combined mass equivalent to the remains of an asteroid 6 miles (10 kilometers) extensive, they calculate.
The researchers take into account a few various explanations for all that dust, but advise that the most possible situation is that collisions between miniature earth-like objects like asteroids are generating the dust. However, it is a tricky circumstance to explain simply because the amount of money of dust hanging close to seems to have remained rather continuous in the course of the six several years that the experts can obtain present observations of TIC 400799224. The researchers hope to go on observing the object to far better comprehend its bizarre patterns.
The investigation is explained in a paper posted Dec. 8 in The Astronomical Journal.
E-mail Meghan Bartels at [email protected] or stick to her on Twitter @meghanbartels. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Fb.
The universe is entire of mysteries.
In observations collected by NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), astronomers stumbled on still a different thriller, and a dusty 1 at that. In new exploration, a workforce of scientists examines likely brings about of odd alerts emitted by an object dubbed TIC 400799224.
Based mostly on what astronomers have found so considerably, the researchers propose that this item could possibly be a binary star, or double star program, in which a single of the stars is surrounded by a enormous cloud of dust, the rubble of probably a large asteroid, according to a statement from the Harvard-Smithsonian Heart for Astrophysics, property to one of the researchers on the crew.
Relevant: The 10 most significant exoplanet discoveries of 2021
TESS is created to location exoplanets by seeking for very small, rhythmic dips in the brightness of a star — dips brought on by a earth passing in involving the telescope and the star, blocking a smidge of its light. Even so, planets are not the only phenomenon that can bring about changing brightness like this, so TESS has gathered a bounty of observations on every thing from supernovas (exploding stars) to triple star methods and far more.
When the scientists had been searching via TESS details gathered in early 2019, TIC 400799224 stood out due to the fact it grew to become nearly 25% dimmer in just a couple hrs, then built numerous far more unexpected brightness alterations. (TIC stands for TESS Enter Catalog and references a database of “each and every optically persistent, stationary item in the sky,” by the way.)
TESS spends about a single thirty day period on a single patch of the sky then moves on, but these patches overlap, so the item was involved in 4 distinctive sectors observed involving March 2019 and May 2021. The scientists also turned to other instruments for more info on the odd item, incorporating info from amenities such as the All-Sky Automated Survey for Supernovae and the Las Cumbres Observatory, the two networks of ground-based mostly observatories close to the globe.
Taken with each other, all this facts permit researchers piece jointly a picture of what could possibly be producing the unusual signal. The scientists suspect that at the heart of TIC 400799224 is a binary star in which two similar stars circle each other. But a single of individuals stars seems to be pulsing just about every 19.77 days, leading to the extra challenging styles that pulsing, the astronomers argue, is prompted by a enormous cloud of dust surrounding the star. That dust has a combined mass equivalent to the remains of an asteroid 6 miles (10 kilometers) extensive, they calculate.
The researchers take into account a few various explanations for all that dust, but advise that the most possible situation is that collisions between miniature earth-like objects like asteroids are generating the dust. However, it is a tricky circumstance to explain simply because the amount of money of dust hanging close to seems to have remained rather continuous in the course of the six several years that the experts can obtain present observations of TIC 400799224. The researchers hope to go on observing the object to far better comprehend its bizarre patterns.
The investigation is explained in a paper posted Dec. 8 in The Astronomical Journal.
E-mail Meghan Bartels at [email protected] or stick to her on Twitter @meghanbartels. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Fb.