NASA's Hubble telescope captures best ever view of stellar debris disk
NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has captured the best ever view of stellar debris disk warped by a massive exoplanet.
NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has captured the best ever view of stellar debris disk warped by a massive exoplanet.Astronomers took the most detailed edge on picture to date of a large disk of gas and dust encircling the 20 million-year-old star Beta Pictoris.Beta Pictoris was the only star to date where astronomers have detected an embedded giant planet in a directly-imaged debris disk. The planet, which was discovered in 2009, goes around the star once every 18 to 20 years. This allowed scientists to study in a comparably short time how a large planet distorts the massive gas and dust encircling the star. These observations should yield new insights into how planets are born around young stars.The new visible-light Hubble image traces the disk to within about 650 million miles of the star. The giant planet orbits at 900 million miles, and was directly imaged in infrared light by the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope six years ago.