Hubble catches images of 'flapping' shadow over new star

NASA's Hubble Space Telescope caught an image of a shadow across a young star that has been nicknamed the "Bat Shadow," according to a press release from NASA.

The shadow was nicknamed because it resembles a pair of wings and NASA reported that the team sees the shadow moving.

"You have a star that is surrounded by a disk, and the disk is not like Saturn’s rings – it’s not flat," Klaus Pontoppidan, an astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, wrote in a paper. "It’s puffed up. And so that means that if the light from the star goes straight up, it can continue straight up – it’s not blocked by anything. But if it tries to go along the plane of the disk, it doesn’t get out, and it casts a shadow."

Pontoppidan wrote the shadow moves like it's a bird flapping its wings and the team has watched the shadow for more than 400 days. He suggested that based on the shadow's shape, the disk surrounding the star is likely flare-shaped like a trumpet or bell-bottom pants.

“If there were just a simple bump in the disk, we'd expect both sides of the shadow to tilt in opposite directions, like airplane wings during a turn," Colette Salyk, a team member from Vassar College, told NASA.

The team also thinks the disk may be a circling structure of rock, gas and dust that has two dips and two peaks. They noted it would explain the flapping of the shadow. A planet might be embedded in the disk, which could warp the shape of the disk and cause the movement in the shadow, according to the NASA press release. 

Hubble can't actually see the disk because it's too small and distant, but the star resides in Serpens Nebula, which is about 1,400 light-years away ad is one or two million years old.