Humanity keeps surpassing the edges of our own solar system tremendously by spotting unique exoplanets. There are enough cosmic objects close to us with mind-boggling characteristics, like Saturn, Jupiter, Uranus, and especially: our own planet Earth. Therefore, trying to imagine what other wonders can exoplanets harbor is a great challenge, indeed.
Astronomers thought that there’s an exoplanet existing at a certain place in the Universe, about 25 light-years away, but the cosmic object now has vanished from sight.
What could have caused it
As long as there is no such thing as giant aliens eating up planets as far as we know, we should look for explanations elsewhere. One compelling scenario is that the ‘disappearing’ planet could actually be a vast cloud of dust produced in a collision of two bodies orbiting the bright star Fomalhaut.
András Gáspár from the University of Arizona, Tucson, stated:
We believe that we were at the right place at the right time to have witnessed such an unlikely event with NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope.
It’s true that further observations are needed for confirmation, but it’s currently our best bet yet. Planets don’t teleport themselves into other Universes. And we can’t even be sure that those other Universes exist, regardless of how much math and physics theory seem to prove it.
George Rieke from the University of Arizona’s Steward Observatory, is adding further reasons for us to believe that the disappearing planet is not actually a planet:
We do have evidence of such collisions in other systems, but none of this magnitude has been observed in our solar system. This is a blueprint of how planets destroy each other.
The Hubble Space Telescope was named after the American astronomer Edwin Hubble. He brought tremendous contributions to space exploration, being the first scientist to discover that there are many other galaxies in the Universe besides our own Milky Way.
