Joel Kontinen
Whatever happened to the planet? It was bright and vivid in 2004, but then it vanished by 2014.
“The distant world — known as Fomalhaut b and located a neighbourly 25 light-years from Earth — was infamous for being one of the first exoplanets ever discovered in visible light by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope; when astronomers first caught sight of it in 2004 and 2006, the planet appeared as a bright, cool dot moving briskly across the sky. Ten years later, that dot had vanished.”
“2A new study published on April 20 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) proposes a solution to the "Mystery of the Disappearing Exoplanet" — and, befitting of any good detective story, there's a twist ending."
"Perhaps, Fomalhaut b disappeared before the Hubble's eyes, the study authors wrote, because Fomalhaut b was never a planet in the first place; in this scenario, the object astronomers saw in 2004 and 2006 was actually a colossal cloud of icy debris created by a recent, violent collision between two planetary fragments.”
Anyhow, finding little green men on the non-existing planet is non-existent.
Source:
Specktor, Brandon. 2020. Mysterious 'disappearing' exoplanet was just a big cloud of asteroid trash, study suggests Live Science 20 April .
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