Astronomers may have caught a relatively nearby star munching on a planet or mini-planets.
A NASA space telescope noticed that the star suddenly started looking a bit strange last year. The Chandra X-Ray Observatory spotted a 30-fold increase in iron on the edge of the star, which is only 10 million years old, along with pronounced dimming.
Astronomers have been watching the baby star — in the constellation Taurus — for decades and iron levels weren’t high in 2015 the last time the Chandra telescope looked at it. The star, called RW Aur A, is 450 light-years away. A light-year is 5.9 trillion miles.
Hans Moritz Guenther, a scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said he’s never seen anything
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