Houdini-like vanishing act discovered in space

London, July 6 (ANI): Astronomers have made a baffling discovery never seen before: an extraordinary amount of dust around a nearby star has mysteriously disappeared.

"It's like the classic magician's trick - now you see it, now you don't," said Carl Melis, a postdoctoral scholar at UC San Diego and lead author of the research.

"Only in this case, we're talking about enough dust to fill an inner solar system, and it really is gone!" he stated.

Co-author Benjamin Zuckerman, a UCLA professor of physics and astronomy said, "It's as if the rings around Saturn had disappeared."

"This is even more shocking because the dusty disc of rocky debris was bigger and much more massive than Saturn's rings. The disc around this star, if it were in our solar system, would have extended from the sun halfway out to Earth, near the orbit of Mercury," Zuckerman added.

This cosmic vanishing act occurred around a star some 450 light years from Earth, in the direction of the constellation Centaurus.

"A perplexing thing about this discovery is that we don't have a satisfactory explanation to address what happened around this star," said Melis, a former UCLA astronomy graduate student.

"The disappearing act appears to be independent of the star itself, as there is no evidence to suggest that the star zapped the dust with some sort of mega-flare or any other violent event," he noted.

Melis described the star, designated TYC 8241 2652, as a "young analog of our sun" that only a few years ago displayed all of the characteristics of "hosting a solar system in the making," before transforming completely. Now, very little of the warm, dusty material thought to originate from collisions of rocky planets is apparent.

"Nothing like this has ever been seen in the many hundreds of stars that astronomers have studied for dust rings. This disappearance is remarkably fast, even on a human time scale, much less an astronomical scale. The dust disappearance at TYC 8241 2652 was so bizarre and so quick, initially I figured that our observations must simply be wrong in some strange way," Zuckerman said.

The dust had been present around the star since at least 1983 (no one had observed the star in the infrared before then), and it continued to glow brightly in the infrared for 25 years. In 2009, it started to dim.

By 2010, the dust emission was gone; the astronomers observed the star twice that year from the Gemini Observatory in Chile, six months apart. An infrared image obtained by the Gemini telescope as recently as May 1 of this year confirmed that the warm dust has now been gone for two-and-a-half years.

Like Earth, warm dust absorbs the energy of sunlight and re-radiates that heat energy as infrared radiation.

Because so much dust had been orbiting around the star, planets very likely are forming there, said Zuckerman, whose research is funded by NASA.

The discovery has been reported in the journal Nature. (ANI)