NASA | STScI | HubbleSite | 2015 Feb 19
Astronomers have used NASA's Hubble Space Telescope to take the most detailed picture to date of a large, edge-on, gas-and-dust disk encircling the 20-million-year-old star Beta Pictoris.
Beta Pictoris remains the only directly imaged debris disk that has a giant planet (discovered in 2009). Because the orbital period is comparatively short (estimated to be between 18 and 22 years), astronomers can see large motion in just a few years. This allows scientists to study how the Beta Pictoris disk is distorted by the presence of a massive planet embedded within the disk.
The new visible-light Hubble image traces the disk in closer to the star to within about 650 million miles of the star (which is inside the radius of Saturn's orbit about the Sun). ...
The Inner Disk Structure, Disk-Planet Interactions, and Temporal Evolution
in the Beta Pictoris System: A Two-Epoch HST/STIS Coronagraphic Study - Daniel Apai et al
- arXiv.org > astro-ph > arXiv:1501.03181 > 13 Jan 2015
