Flying Moth Star discovered

[Prokomenos]

Astronomers studying our corner of the galaxy have found a strange object that looks like a moth spreading its wings and a never before seen system of four tightly grouped stars.

The first of these phenomena, dubbed the Moth, is a disk of dust and gas illuminated by a young star in the constellation Puppis.


Such disks, believed to be made of the material from which planets form, are common around young stars.

But this one is oddly bent, as though flying into a headwind, and that's exactly what it's doing, said Glenn Schneider of the University of Arizona. Schneider was part of a team that took infrared images of the object with the Hubble Space Telescope.
"Dust grains normally orbit in a plane unless they're disturbed by something," he said yesterday at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Austin, Texas.
But in this case, he said, the star and its disk are plowing through an interstellar gas cloud.

"That produces a local wind that is blowing the dust backward, producing this meniscus-like [or crescent] shape," Schneider said.

"Intense Radiation"

The Moth was found as part of a systematic search for planet-forming disks that might shed light on how planetary systems, including our own, formed.
About 112 light-years from the sun, the Moth was detected because of the intense infrared light it emits.

"One of the things that drew us to this star system is how bright it is in the infrared," said Schneider's colleague Dean Hines of the Space Science Institute in Corrales, New Mexico.
That intense radiation indicates the presence of an unusually large amount of dust, Hines said.

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2008/01/080111-moth-stars.html