Free Astronomy Magazine May-June 2015

SPACE CHRONICLES omers can see large motion in just a few years. This allows sci- entists to study how the Beta Pictoris disk is distorted by the presence of a massive planet embedded with- in the disk. The new visible-light Hubble image traces the disk in closer to the star to within about 650 million miles of the star (which is inside Hubble gets best view of a circumstellar debris disk distorted by a planet by NASA A stronomers have used NA- SA's Hubble Space Telescope to take the most detailed picture to date of a large, edge-on, gas-and-dust disk encircling the 20- million-year-old star Beta Pictoris. Beta Pictoris remains the only di- rectly imaged debris disk that has a giant planet (discovered in 2009). Because the orbital period is com- paratively short (estimated to be between 18 and 22 years), astron- T he photo at the bottom is the most detailed picture to date of a large, edge-on, gas-and- dust disk encircling the 20-million-year-old star Beta Pictoris. The new visible-light Hubble image traces the disk in closer to the star to within about 650 million miles of the star (which is inside the ra- dius of Saturn's orbit about the Sun). When com- paring the latest images to Hubble images taken in 1997 (top), astronomers find that the disk's dust distribution has barely changed over 15 years de- spite the fact that the entire structure is orbiting the star like a carousel. The Hubble Space Tele- scope photo has been artificially colored to bring out detail in the disk's structure. [NASA, ESA, and D. Apai and G. Schneider (University of Arizona)]