esahubble_opo1506b February 20th, 2015
Credit: NASA, ESA, and D. Apai and G. Schneider (University of Arizona)
This is the most detailed picture to date of a large, edge-on, gas-and-dust disc encircling the 20 million year old star Beta Pictoris. It is compared with a previous image of the disc. Beta Pictoris remains the only directly imaged debris disc that has a giant planet (discovered in 2009) with an orbital period short enough (estimated to be between 18 and 22 years) that astronomers can see large motion in just a few years. This allows scientists to study how the Beta Pictoris disc is distorted by the presence of a massive planet embedded within the disc. The new visible-light Hubble image traces the disc to within about one billion kilometres of the star (which is inside the radius of Saturn's orbit about the Sun). Links: NASA Press release Beta Pictoris - Comparison
Provider: Hubble Space Telescope | ESA
Image Source: https://www.spacetelescope.org/images/opo1506b/
Curator: ESA/Hubble, Garching bei München, Germany
Image Use Policy: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
Detailed color mapping information coming soon...
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