Tau.Neutrino said:
The 10 most bizarre space discoveries of 2020
It’s no secret that space is incredibly weird, but every year astronomers seem to outdo themselves in discovering bizarre new objects and events. From extreme exoplanets to stars with strange fates, clues to an old mystery and the beginnings of a brand new one, here are 10 of the weirdest astronomical discoveries that blew our minds (and those of scientists) this year.
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> Fomalhaut b was one of the first exoplanets to be discovered – and this year, astronomers undiscovered it. A team analyzing a decade’s worth of Hubble observations found that what had been a bright spot of light in 2004 had completely vanished by 2014. That’s obviously not something planets can do easily, and the researchers proposed a rather neat explanation – Fomalhaut b had never existed. Well, not as a planet anyway. Computer simulations suggested it was more likely a dense dust cloud, created from a collision between two asteroids or comets, which then drifted apart over a decade.
Now that’s darn interesting. It was a bit weird to start with, in an orbit that was incompatible with the orbits of the rings IIRC.
This is ALL very interesting.