Massive HIDDEN planet could be lurking inside this ‘dusty disk’ just 500 lightyears away

SCIENTISTS believe a secret planet may be hiding within the dusty disk surrounding a young star.

There have already been hints that a massive planet is orbiting a star called IM Lupi.

1

The strange system is located more than 500 lightyears away.

But experts believe they finally have evidence that a planet really does hide within.

The young star and the disk around it had all the signs of a planet’s interference.

There are over a dozen “kinks”.

This is where the gas moves at a different rate than what experts would expect for a smoothly rotating disk, according to AAS Nova.

There’s also a spiral pattern imprinted along the upper surface of the disk.

So a group of scientists decided to look at things differently, to see how the presence of a planet would affect IM Lupi’s disk.

While their findings have the signals of a planet, they say more work is needed to confirm its presence.

Harrison Verrios and his team from Monash University in Australia found that widespread features popped up in their simulations.

This suggests that planets can have more far-reaching effects than predicted.

“We show that the wake of the planet can be traced in the observed peak velocity map, which appears to closely follow the morphology expected from our simulations and from analytic models of planet–disk interaction,” their research paper states.

Their findings were published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

We pay for your stories! Do you have a story for The Sun Online Tech & Science team? Email us at [email protected]