SPACE — The James Webb Telescope captures what at first glance looks like a cat’s tail in Beta Pictoris. Beta Pictoris is the closest star system to Earth which is amazing.
In 1984, Beta Pictoris became the first star discovered surrounded by a bright disk of dust and debris. New planets are forming within these dust disks. As a result, the discovery of BEta Pictoris confirmed astronomers’ theories about how planets form.
Beta Pictoris continues to fascinate scientists. On January 10, 2024, the American Space Agency (NASA) said the enhanced power of the Webb space telescope had revealed unusual and unexpected features of the Beta Pictoris dust disk.
The James Webb Telescope captured a trail of dust about 16 billion km long that came from the star and looks like a moving cat’s tail.
Isabel Rebollido of the Center for Astrobiology in Spain and lead author of the study explains why this mysterious star system continues to fascinate astronomers.
“Beta Pictoris is a dust disk that has everything. The system has a very bright and close star that we can observe very well, and a complex clawed environment with a multicomponent disk, an exocomet and two photographed exoplanets,” he said, as reported by Earth Sky.
Overall, the paper’s authors estimate that the cat’s tail contains the equivalent amount of dust as a large main belt asteroid. The source of the cat’s tail feature is likely a recent collision.
The scientists who discovered the feline feature of Beta Pictoris think that this may be evidence of an impact crater that occurred within the star’s highly active dust disk. Scientists think that it happened relatively recently, in the last 100 years or so.
Marshall Perrin, one of the study’s authors at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Maryland, explains how the dust trail might have formed.
“Something happened – like a crash – and a lot of dust was produced,” he said.
At first, the dust moves in the same orbital direction as the source, but then it also begins to spread out. The light from the star pushes the smallest and softest dust particles away from the star more quickly. Meanwhile, larger grains don’t travel as far to create long dust trails.
The high speed of the particles in the tail leads researchers to believe that this structure consists of light organic refractive material. Organic refractive materials are dark, dusty materials found on the surfaces of comets and asteroids orbiting the sun.
The cat’s tail glows brightly in infrared
The eyes are the part of a cat that we think of as shining, but this cosmic cat’s tail also glows in the infrared spectrum. Astronomers used Webb’s Near Infrared Camera (NIRCam) and Mid Infrared Instrument (MIRI) to make this discovery.
Researchers are investigating the composition of previously detected Beta Pictoris primary and secondary dust disks. Christopher Stark, one of the study authors at NASA’s Space Flight Center, said the team was surprised by what they found.
2024-02-01 14:33:00
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