NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has taken the most detailed picture to-date of an edge-on disk made of gas and dust that is circling a 20-million-year-old star named Beta Pictoris, according to a press release from the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Md.
"Beta Pictoris remains the only directly imaged debris disk that has a giant planet (discovered in 2009)," according to the institute, with an orbital period between 18 and 22 years, so astronomers don't have to wait long to see big changes. Astronomers are studying how the disk is affected by the massive planet.
"Some computer simulations predicted a complicated structure for the inner disk due to the gravitational pull by the short-period giant planet," said University of Arizona's Daniel Apai, according to the press release. "The new images reveal the inner disk and confirm the predicted structures. This finding validates models, which will help us to deduce the presence of other exoplanets in other disks."
The new Hubble images use visible light, but the planet was directly imaged six years ago by the European Southern Observatory's infrared Very Large Telescope.
The disk's dust distribution orbits "like a carousel," but astronomers found that in comparison to the 1997 Hubble images, not much has changed. They believe the disk's orbit and the planet's orbit are roughly the same.
"The Beta Pictoris disk is the prototype for circumstellar debris systems, but it may not be a good archetype," said co-author Glenn Schneider from the University of Arizona, according to the press release.
Beta Pictoris is the closest disk system to the Earth and of the 24 disk systems imaged by Hubble, researchers believe Beta Pictoris is the best one to study, according to the press release.
For more on the Hubble Space Telescope and what it has given us during its 25 years in orbit, click here for HNGN's exclusive interview with former Hubble astronaut, Mike Massimino.
