While looking for planets forming in the huge disk of dust surrounding a young star, scientists got surprised to encounter fast-moving, wavelike arches racing across the disk like ripples in water.

They for the first time discovered the five structures in data from the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope in Chile, when the team was looking for lumps and bumps that could give any clue about formation of planets around the young star.

While looking back at images captured with the Hubble Space Telescope in 2010 and 2011, researchers managed to spot the same features but in different locations. A latest footage of the mysterious ripples has very well described the odd features as seen by ESO scientists.

In a statement, Anthony Boccaletti, researcher from LESIA in France and lead author on the paper, said, “Our observations have shown something unexpected. The images from [the Very Large Telescope instrument] SPHERE shows a set of unexplained features in the disk, which have an arch-like or wavelike structure unlike anything that has ever been observed before”.

The researchers went through the earlier Hubble records of the star and saw that the strange ripples were moving extremely fast.

Christian Thalmann, team member from ETH Zurich in Switzerland, said they reprocessed pictures from the Hubble data and obtained sufficient information for tracking the movement of these strange features over a time span of 4 years. Thalmann added that by doing this they have discovered that the arches were racing away from the star at speeds of up to 40,000 km/h.

"We reprocessed images from the Hubble data and ended up with enough information to track the movement of these strange features over a four-year period," Christian Thalmann, a team member from ETH Zurich, in Switzerland, said in the statement. "By doing this, we found that the arches are racing away from the star at speeds of up to 40,000 km/h [24,855 mph]!"

"One explanation for the strange structure links them to the star's flares," co-author Glenn Schneider, of Steward Observatory in Arizona, said in the statement. "AU Mic is a star with high flaring activity — it often lets off huge and sudden bursts of energy from on or near its surface."