Dr. Christopher Stark from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center and his colleagues present new coronagraphic images from the NIRCam (Near-Infrared Camera) and MIRI (Mid-Infrared Instrument) instruments onboard the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope that reveal previously unseen structures in the debris disk around the young star Beta Pictoris.
Beta Pictoris is a young planetary system located approximately 63 light-years away from Earth.
It is estimated to be only 20 million years old and is known to host a gas giant, Beta Pictoris b.
In a new study, Dr. Stark and co-authors used Webb’s NIRCam and MIRI instruments to investigate the composition of Beta Pictoris’ main and secondary debris disks.
“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 environment with a multi-component disk, exocomets, and two imaged exoplanets,” said Astrobiology Center astronomer Isabel Rebollido.
“While there have been previous observations from the ground in this wavelength range, they did not have the sensitivity and the spatial resolution that we now have with Webb, so they didn’t detect this feature.”
Even with Webb, peering at Beta Pictoris in the right wavelength range was crucial to detect a never-before-seen dust trail resembling a cat’s tail, as it only appeared in the MIRI data.
Webb’s mid-infrared data also revealed differences in temperature between Beta Pictoris’ two disks, which likely is due to differences in composition.
“We didn’t expect Webb to reveal that there are two different types of material around Beta Pictoris, but MIRI clearly showed us that the material of the secondary disk and cat’s tail is hotter than the main disk,” Dr. Stark said.
“The dust that forms that disk and tail must be very dark, so we don’t easily see it at visible wavelengths — but in the…
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