File:Hubble images TW Hydrae Disc Shadows (annotated) (heic2305b).jpg

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Description	English: Comparison images from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, taken several years apart, have uncovered two eerie shadows moving counterclockwise across a disc of gas and dust encircling the young star TW Hydrae. The discs are tilted face-on as seen from Earth and so give astronomers a bird’s-eye view of what’s happening around the star. The left image, taken in 2016, shows just one shadow [A] at the 11 o’clock position. This shadow is cast by an inner disc that is slightly inclined to the outer disc and so blocks starlight. The picture on the left shows a second shadow that emerged from yet another nested disc at the 7 o’clock position, as photographed in 2021. What was originally the inner disc is marked [B] in this later view. The shadows rotate around the star at different rates like the hand on a clock. They are evidence for two unseen planets that have pulled dust into their orbits. This makes them slightly inclined to each other. This is a visible-light photo taken with the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph. Artificial colour has been added to enhance details.[Image description: This Hubble Space Telescope Image shows two side-by -side circles that are photos, taken in 2016 and 2021, of nested discs of gas and dust encircling the star TW Hydrae. The view is looking down on top of the discs. In the left image a shadow can be seen at the 11 o’clock position. A later image, on the right, shows two shadows at the 11 o’clock and 7 o’clock positions. This is evidence for two nested discs that are inclined at different angles.]
Date	4 May 2023 (upload date)
Source	Hubble images TW Hydrae Disc Shadows (annotated)
Author	NASA, ESA, J. Debes STScI
Other versions	TIFF version

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current	07:50, 5 May 2023		1,452 × 726 (263 KB)	OptimusPrimeBot (talk \| contribs)	#Spacemedia - Upload of https://cdn.spacetelescope.org/archives/images/large/heic2305b.jpg via Commons:Spacemedia

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Author	Space Telescope Science Institute Office of Public Outreach
Source	ESA/Hubble
Credit/Provider	NASA, ESA, J. Debes STScI
Short title	Hubble images TW Hydrae Disc Shadows (annotated)
Image title	Comparison images from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, taken several years apart, have uncovered two eerie shadows moving counterclockwise across a disc of gas and dust encircling the young star TW Hydrae. The discs are tilted face-on as seen from Earth and so give astronomers a bird’s-eye view of what’s happening around the star. The left image, taken in 2016, shows just one shadow [A] at the 11 o’clock position. This shadow is cast by an inner disc that is slightly inclined to the outer disc and so blocks starlight. The picture on the left shows a second shadow that emerged from yet another nested disc at the 7 o’clock position, as photographed in 2021. What was originally the inner disc is marked [B] in this later view. The shadows rotate around the star at different rates like the hand on a clock. They are evidence for two unseen planets that have pulled dustinto their orbits. This makes them slightly inclined to each other. This is a visible-light photo taken with the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph. Artificial colour has been added to enhance details. [Image description: This Hubble Space Telescope Image shows two side-by -side circles that are photos, taken in 2016 and 2021, of nested discs of gas and dust encircling the star TW Hydrae. The view is looking down on top of the discs. In the left image a shadow can be seen at the 11 o’clock position. A later image, on the right, shows two shadows at the 11 o’clock and 7 o’clock positions. This is evidence for two nested discs that are inclined at different angles.]
Usage terms	Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
Date and time of data generation	16:00, 4 May 2023
JPEG file comment	Our universe is so capricious it sometimes likes to play a game of hide and seek. In 2017 astronomers were surprised to see a huge shadow sweeping across a disk of dust and gas encircling the nearby young star TW Hydrae. The shadow is cast by an inner disk of dust and gas that is slightly tilted to the plane of the outer disk. The shadow can only be clearly seen because the system is tilted face-on to Earth, giving astronomers a bird’s-eye view of the disk as the shadow sweeps around the disk like a hand moving around a clock. But a clock has two hands (hours and minutes) sweeping around at different rates. And, it turns out, so does TW Hydrae. Astronomers used Hubble to find a second shadow emerging from yet another inner disk, that is tilted to the two outer disks. So the system looks increasingly complicated with at least three nested disks slightly tilted relative to each other. The disks are proxies for unseen planets around the star. Each planet is gravitationally pulling on material near the star an warping what would have been a perfectly flat pancake-disk if no planets were present. This is not a surprise because the planets in our solar system have orbital planes that vary in tilt by a few degrees from each other. TW Hydrae gives astronomers a ringside seat to how our solar system may have looked during its formative years.
Software used	Adobe Photoshop 24.1 (Macintosh)
File change date and time	15:00, 25 April 2023
Date and time of digitizing	07:56, 21 March 2023
Date metadata was last modified	11:14, 25 April 2023
Unique ID of original document	xmp.did:f8ea9af1-2523-43af-8f13-19caf875efc7
Keywords	TW Hydrae
Contact information	outreach@stsci.edu https://esahubble.org ESA Office, Space Telescope Science Institute, 3700 San Martin Dr Baltimore, MD, 21218 United States 410-338-4444
IIM version	4

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