The young star TW Hydrae is playing ‘shadow puppets’ with scientists observing it with NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope. In 2017, astronomers reported discovering a shadow sweeping across the face of a vast pancake-shaped gas-and-dust disk surrounding the red dwarf star. The shadow isn’t from a planet, but from an inner disk slightly inclined relative to the much larger outer disk — causing it to cast a shadow. One explanation is that an unseen planet’s gravity is pulling dust and gas into the planet’s inclined orbit. The young star TW Hydrae is playing ‘shadow puppets’ with scientists observing it with NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope. Now, a second shadow — playing a game of peek-a-boo — has emerged in just a few years between observations stored in Hubble’s MAST archive. This could be from yet another disk nestled inside the system. The two disks are likely evidence of a pair of planets under construction.
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Source: ScienceDaily