Zooming Into the Bat Shadow and Its Flapping

This video takes the viewer from the region around the Serpens Nebula to the young star HBC 672. This star is known by its nickname of Bat Shadow because of its winglike shadow feature. The NASA, ESA Hubble Space Telescope has now observed a curious flapping motion in the shadow of the stars disc for the first time. The star resides in a stellar nursery called the Serpens Nebula, about 1300 lightyears away. This video also includes an animation that may explain the blat shadows flapping movement. The star is believed to be surrounded by a warped, saddleshaped disc with two peaks and two dips. A planet embedded in the disc, inclined to the discs plane, may be causing this warping. As the disc rotates around the young star, it blocks the light from that star and casts a varying, flapping shadow on a distant cloud. Credit: ESA, Hubble, Digitized Sky Survey, L. Calçada, Nick Risinger Music: Konstantino Polizois