Hubble Telescope peeks at star with planet-forming disk that gets 3 times hotter than the sun
By Kiona N. Smith published 2 days ago
"You could lose, or at least completely fry, rocky planets forming close to such a star."
Artist's concept of the early stages of the young star FU Orionis (FU Ori) outburst, surrounded by a disk of material. (Image credit: NASA-JPL, Caltech)
A star about 1,360 light-years away from Earth, named FU Orionis, is twice as hot as astronomers previously suspected, according to recent data from the Hubble Space Telescope. In fact, scientists believe that the region where FU Orionis's planet-forming disk touches the star's surface glows at around 16,000 Kelvin — three times hotter than the surface of our sun.
Caltech astronomer Adolfo Carvalho and his colleagues suggest the area around the star is so surprisingly hot because a rapidly-spinning disk of material falling into the star is actually scraping against its surface, creating a shockwave that glows a hundred times brighter than the star itself. And that could create a rough environment for Earth-like planets; the star's interaction with the disk of material around it is just too explosive for a planet like Earth — or Mars, for that matter — to form.
"You could lose, or at least completely fry, rocky planets forming close to such a star," says Carvalho in a statement.
A bright, but strange, young star
The bright variable star FU Orionis is one of a bizarre class of newly-formed stars. Like most young stars, it's surrounded by a glowing disk of gas and dust, which will eventually coalesce into planets. But FU Orionis is still feeding on its disk, growing larger by consuming material that would otherwise be the building blocks of a system of planets. As the gas and dust in FU Orionis's accretion disk spirals toward the star, it speeds up, causing the disk to glow — the hallmark of what astronomers call a "T Tauri star."
More:
https://www.space.com/the-universe/stars/hubble-telescope-peeks-at-star-with-planet-forming-disk-that-gets-3-times-hotter-than-the-sun