Astronomers have used the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope to take the most detailed picture to date of a large, edge-on, gas-and-dust disc encircling the 20-million-year-old star Beta Pictoris. Beta Pictoris remains the only directly imaged debris disc that has a giant planet (discovered in 2009). Because the orbital period is comparatively short (estimated to be between 18 and 22 years), 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. This 2012 visible-light Hubble image traces the disc to within about 1050 million kilometres of the star (which is inside the radius of Saturn's orbit about the Sun).
Credit:
NASA, ESA, D. Apai and G. Schneider (University of Arizona)
