Free Astronomy Magazine March-April 2024

38 MARCH-APRIL 2024 ASTRO PUBLISHING with respect to the outer disk, which was seen first. Now, a team of astronomers using NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope to image the Beta Pictoris (Beta Pic) system has discovered a new, previously unseen structure. The team, led by Isabel Rebollido of the Astrobiology Cen- ter in Spain, used Webb’s NIRCam (Near-Infrared Camera) and MIRI (Mid-Infrared Instrument) to inves- tigate the composition of Beta Pic’s previously detected main and sec- ondary debris disks. The results ex- ceeded their expectations, revealing a sharply inclined branch of dust, shaped like a cat’s tail, that extends from the southwest portion of the secondary debris disk. “Beta Pictoris is the debris disk that has it all: It has a really bright, close star that we can study very well, and a complex circumstellar environ- ment with a multi-component disk, by NASA/ESA/CSA − Abigail Major & Christine Pulliam B eta Pictoris, a young planetary system located just 63 light- years away, continues to in- trigue scientists even after decades of in-depth study. It possesses the first dust disk imaged around an- other star — a disk of debris pro- duced by collisions between aster- oids, comets, and planetesimals. Observations from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope revealed a second debris disk in this system, inclined A dusty ‘cat’s tail’ in Beta Pictoris system B eta Pictoris image cap- tured by Webb’s MIRI (Mid-Infrared Instrument). A coronagraph (black circle and two small disks) has been used to block the light of the central star. Certain features are highlighted and labeled. A white line traces over the orange main debris disk and is labeled “main disk plane.” A thin blue-green disk is in- clined about five degrees counterclockwise relative to the orange main disk and is highlighted by a blue-green line labeled “extended sec- ondary disk.” Some of the gray material clustered near the center forms a curved feature in the upper right, which is marked with a yel- low line labeled “cat’s tail.” A scale bar shows that the disks of Beta Pic extend for hundreds of astronomical units (AU), where one AU is the average Earth-Sun distance. (In our solar system, Neptune orbits 30 AU from the sun.) In this image, light at 15.5 microns is colored cyan and 23 microns is orange (filters F1550C and F2300C, respectively). [NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, Christopher Stark (NASA-GSFC), Kellen Lawson (NASA-GSFC), Jens Kammerer (ESO), Marshall Perrin (STScI)]