Spitzer Discovers Young Stars with a 'Hula Hoop'

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Written by Adam Hadhazy
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Whitney Clavin 818-354-4673
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
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News feature: 2013-236 July 31, 2013

Spitzer Discovers Young Stars with a 'Hula Hoop'

The full version of this story with accompanying images is at:
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?release=2013-236&cid=release_2013-236

Astronomers using NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope have spotted a young stellar system that
"blinks" every 93 days. Called YLW 16A, the system likely consists of three developing stars, two
of which are surrounded by a disk of material left over from the star-formation process.

As the two inner stars whirl around each other, they periodically peek out from the disk that girds
them like a hula hoop. The hoop itself appears to be misaligned from the central star pair, probably
due to the disrupting gravitational presence of the third star orbiting at the periphery of the system.
The whole system cycles through bright and faint phases, with the central stars playing a sort of
cosmic peek-a-boo as the tilted disk twirls around them. It is believed that this disk should go on to
spawn planets and the other celestial bodies that make up a solar system.

Spitzer observed infrared light from YLW 16A, emitted by the warmed gas and dust in the disk that
still swathes the young stars. Other observations came from the ground-based 2MASS survey, as
well as from the NACO instrument at the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope
in Chile.

YLW 16A is the fourth example of a star system known to blink in such a manner, and the second
in the same star-forming region Rho Ophiuchus. The finding suggests that these systems might be
more common than once thought. Blinking star systems with warped disks offer scientists a way to
study how planets form in these environments. The planets can orbit one or both of the stars in the
binary star system. The famous science fictional planet Tatooine in "Star Wars" orbits two stars,
hence its double sunsets. Such worlds are referred to as circumbinary planets. Astronomers can
record how light is absorbed by planet-forming disks during the bright and faint phases of blinking
stellar systems, which in turn reveals information about the materials that comprise the disk.

"These blinking systems offer natural probes of the binary and circumbinary planet formation
process," said Peter Plavchan, a scientist at the NASA Exoplanet Science Institute and Infrared
Processing and Analysis Center at the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, Calif., and lead
author of a new paper accepted for publication in Astronomy & Astrophysics.

NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., manages the Spitzer Space Telescope mission
for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington. Science operations are conducted at the
Spitzer Science Center at Caltech. Data are archived at the Infrared Science Archive housed at the
Infrared Processing and Analysis Center. Caltech manages JPL for NASA. For more information
about Spitzer, visit http://spitzer.caltech.edu and http://www.nasa.gov/spitzer .

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