A phenomenon never seen before. A team of astronomers has detected gigantic and mysterious waves in the dust disk that surrounds a star quite close to us: its name is AU Microscopii and it is located only 32 light years from Earth .
The discovery of this new enigma to be solved has been possible thanks to the SPHERE instrument of the VLT ( Very Large Telescope ) telescope of the European Southern Observatory (ESO) in Cerro Paranal, (Chile). Scientists discovered in these images some strange shapes, similar to the waves that form in terrestrial water, that run through the disk that surrounds this young star .
“The images show something unexpected, a set of inexplicable features on the disk that have an arc-shaped or wave-like structure , something totally different from anything that had been observed before, ” explains Anthony Boccaletti, leader of the study.
In addition, reviewing previous images of the same disk taken in previous years by the Hubble telescope, they discovered that they not only confirmed the presence of these mysterious waves, but also that they move very fast .
“We reprocessed images from the Hubble data and in the end we got enough information to follow the movement of this strange phenomenon over a period of four years. By doing this, we discover that the arcs are moving away from the star at speeds of up to 40,000 kilometers per hour! ”, Says Christian Thalmann, co-author of the study.
What is this strange phenomenon due to? Scientists believe that it may be due to flares from the star that may have triggered something on one of the planets that could be propagating through the disk, but the truth is that, for now, the ideal explanation represents a mystery to be solved.
The work has been published in the journal Nature .
