A team of researchers have recently concluded that the mysterious behaviour surrounding a star was likely caused by it “devouring a planet.” As for how they know this, researchers have been studying a star named ‘RW Aur A’ located 450 light years since 1937, in doing so they have found that the very young star was dimming periodically – “every few decades for about a month.” That was until around 2011 in which the star started dimming more often and for longer, to find out why scientists turned to the Chandra X-ray Observatory and found that the tech was able to detect an abundance of iron surrounding RW Aur A.
From here the researchers concluded that the likely reason for the excess iron was due to it being scattered out during a planetary collision. Hans Guenther, who led the study out of MIT’s Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research ha this to say: “If our interpretation of the data is correct, this would be the first time that we directly observe a young star devouring a planet or planets.”
