UX Tauri, abbreviated as UX Tau, is a

binary star A binary star or binary star system is a system of two stars that are gravitationally bound to and in orbit around each other. Binary stars in the night sky that are seen as a single object to the naked eye are often resolved as separate stars us ...

system approximately 450

light-year A light-year, alternatively spelled light year (ly or lyr), is a unit of length used to express astronomical distances and is equal to exactly , which is approximately 9.46 trillion km or 5.88 trillion mi. As defined by the International Astr ...

s away in the

constellation A constellation is an area on the celestial sphere in which a group of visible stars forms Asterism (astronomy), a perceived pattern or outline, typically representing an animal, mythological subject, or inanimate object. The first constellati ...

Taurus Taurus is Latin for 'bull' and may refer to: * Taurus (astrology), the astrological sign ** Vṛṣabha, in vedic astrology * Taurus (constellation), one of the constellations of the zodiac * Taurus (mythology), one of two Greek mythological ch ...

(the

Bull A bull is an intact (i.e., not Castration, castrated) adult male of the species ''Bos taurus'' (cattle). More muscular and aggressive than the females of the same species (i.e. cows proper), bulls have long been an important symbol cattle in r ...

). It is notable for the fact that, despite its recent (in stellar terms) creation, the

Spitzer Space Telescope The Spitzer Space Telescope, formerly the Space Infrared Telescope Facility (SIRTF), was an infrared space telescope launched in 2003, that was deactivated when operations ended on 30 January 2020. Spitzer was the third space telescope dedicate ...

discovered that its

protoplanetary disk A protoplanetary disk is a rotating circumstellar disc of dense gas and dust surrounding a young newly formed star, a T Tauri star, or Herbig Ae/Be star. The protoplanetary disk may not be considered an accretion disk; while the two are sim ...

contains a gap. The dust, which normally accumulates in an expanding ring starting right next to the star at such a young age, is either very thin or nonexistent at a range of 0.2 to 56 AU from the star. Typically, this means that the early ancestors of

planets A planet is a large, rounded astronomical body that is generally required to be in orbit around a star, stellar remnant, or brown dwarf, and is not one itself. The Solar System has eight planets by the most restrictive definition of the te ...

may be forming from the disk, though the star only ignited about 1 million years ago. In contrast,

Earth Earth is the third planet from the Sun and the only astronomical object known to Planetary habitability, harbor life. This is enabled by Earth being an ocean world, the only one in the Solar System sustaining liquid surface water. Almost all ...

was formed approximately 4.54 billion years ago, placing its formation about sixty million years after the

Sun The Sun is the star at the centre of the Solar System. It is a massive, nearly perfect sphere of hot plasma, heated to incandescence by nuclear fusion reactions in its core, radiating the energy from its surface mainly as visible light a ...

's ignition around 4.6 billion years ago.

References

External links

* * Circumstellar disks Binary stars T Tauri stars Taurus (constellation) Hypothetical planetary systems Tauri, UX K-type main-sequence stars M-type main-sequence stars Emission-line stars 285846 020990 {{Multi-star-stub

See also

References

External links