An Exoplanet Mysteriously Disappeared

You must be wondering by reading the heading, isn’t? Yeah, it’s true. The entire science world is at the same excitement today. This inexplicable interesting universe always confuses us with its tricky behaviour. Now our Hubble Space Telescope became a victim of such a trick. I will tell you how this happened.

NASA’s Hubble found a bright object in Fomalhaut System in 2004. This stellar system is about 25 light-years from us. By the continuous observation of Hubble from 2004 to 2006, NASA declared this object as an exoplanet and named it as Fomalhaut b. This news made this stellar system famous in the science world. This observation had great importance at that time because it was the first stellar system with an extrasolar planet candidate imaged at visible wavelengths.

When Hubble looked back to this stellar system after a few years, it became totally shocked and shattered. Yeah, that exoplanet has gone missing.? Hubble might have yelled, “OH..NO…WHAT THE HELL HAPPENED..”?

This is not a fictional world to get things engulfed by an Ultra Giant Space Monster. Well, then is it a krypton Planet?? Oh…it’s totally absurd…? Do you think our Hubble is old and lost its vision?? No way, ? he is still rocking his life up there in space by taking many spectacular images. Then what happened??? what about a collision? Mm..yeah..but not accurate.?

Okay, don’t worry, we got the answer. Yes,

Last day NASA published an article revealing the secret behind this elusive guy in Fomalhaut System. But it’s too sad that we were late to know the truth about this Fomalhaut b. Yeah, that elusive guy was tricking us by acting like a bonafide exoplanet.

As per the new theory, this object was actually not an exoplanet. This Fomalhaut b was actually a spherical body of dust and the remnants of a collision between two planetary bodies. From the further observation of Hubble, it has been found that the brightness of that object is getting reduced and the body itself is getting vanished slowly.

A dust globe?! Yes

That was actually just a dust globe. In the video given below, you can see the way it gets expanding and how its brightness changing with year. Now, this has grains in the size of few micrometres. It’s now expanding and currently, the dust cloud is estimated to have expanded by now to a size larger than the orbit of Earth around our Sun.

This dust was actually formed by the collision of two large bodies orbiting the bright star Fomalhaut. You can find Fomalhaut b very close to the asteroid belt. This is a ring of Icy debris. So the collision is believed to happen between two comet-like bodies. After the collision, this dust glob followed an escape path instead of a path for a planet. The team behind this invention is currently developing a model with the help of the computer which will help us to know the entire story. From the studies, it is known that this type of collision occurs once every 200000 years. So, our Hubble was very lucky to witness this auspicious event.

All the science lovers want to know more about this elusive guy. And for that, we need more precise observation. For that, we have a hero which will be launched on March 30, 2021. This superhero telescope called James Webb Space Telescope will provide us with more details. The study will help us to know the entire secret of this system. It will study the system in all details. We can wait for that precious data.

– Arun S

Image Credits: NASA

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