Mysterious dusty object discovered by an astronomical object in the distance.
In contrast to comets with dust – which are likely to disintegrate quickly – the object is intact despite being able to shed an immense quantity of material.
Astronomers have observed a mysteriously dusty object that orbits an astronomical object far away.
Although the object could be an astronomical binary system, According to an article published in The Astronomical Journal, scientists are confused by the volume of dust it releases.
Contrary to dusty comets that are likely to explode, this object has remained in place while it has shed a huge amount of material.
What was the method of discovery new object?
Photos of this object were gathered by NASA’s planet-hunting spacecraft called the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) that was launched in 2018.
So far, TESS has found 172 planets that are not part of our solar system. TESS has made more than 4,700 possible candidates.
It also has discovered more than a billion objects included within the TESS Input Catalogue (TIC) that follow-up research has identified as a variety of cosmic objects and phenomena.
Then, Dr. Karen Collins, an astronomer at Harvard Smithsonian Center in Astrophysics, discovered another TIC with 400799224.
By using machine-learning algorithms applied to TIC data, Dr. Collins discovered the object that previously revealed “stellar pulsations, shocks from supernovae, disintegrating planets, gravitational self-lensed binary stars, eclipsing triple star systems, disk occultations, and more”.
Dr. Collins and her colleagues claimed the bizarre TIC was discovered “serendipitously” when it rapidly diminished in brightness – by more than 25% in several hours.
What exactly is new discovered object?
Astronomers believe it’s an asymmetric star system where one of the stars is pulsating with the 19.77-day interval, possibly resulting from an orbiting object that periodically releases dust clouds.
However, the nature of the orbiting body has been described as “puzzling” because of the quantity of dust expelled.
If it was an object that was disintegrating, such as the Asteroid Ceres in our solar system, it would only live for around 8000 years.
In the six years when the object was examined, the amount of dust and the frequency of being shed seems to remain.
The team plans to keep an eye on the object and integrate previous observations to discover the changes over time.
Source: News.sky
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