Credit: C.A. Grady (National Optical Astronomy Observatories, NASA/ESA Goddard Space Flight Center), B. Woodgate (NASA/ESA Goddard Space Flight Center), F. Bruhweiler and A. Boggess (Catholic University of America), P. Plait and D. Lindler (ACC, Inc., Goddard Space Flight Center), M. Clampin ( Space Telescope Science Institute), and NASA/ESA, P. Kalas (SpaceTelescope Science Institute)

The Hubble telescope image on the right shows a windowpane-shaped occulting bar -- the dark bands running vertically through the middle of the image and horizontally across the upper part of it. The occulting bar covers the innermost part of the disk and star, about 7.1 billion miles (11.5 billion kilometers) or 1.4 times our solar system's diameter. The diagonal lines are the remnants of the diffraction spikes produced in Hubble telescope images of bright stars.

Provider: Hubble Space Telescope | ESA

Image Source: https://www.spacetelescope.org/images/opo9921b/

Curator: ESA/Hubble, Garching bei München, Germany

Image Use Policy: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License