An international team of astronomers exploring the disk of gas and dust the bright star Beta Pictoris have uncovered a compact cloud of poisonous gas formed by ongoing rapid-fire collisions among a swarm of icy, comet-like bodies. The "clapper" is the gravitational wallop of a star that passed near Beta Pictoris some 100,000 years ago. In 1984 Beta Pictoris was the very first star discovered to be surrounded by a bright disk of dust and debris. GPI H-band images. 2015, ApJ, 811, 17. The planetary dust disk around the nearby star Beta Pictoris is dynamically "ringing like a bell," say astronomers investigating Hubble telescope images. The star accomplishes a rotation every 0.54 Earth days, compared to the sun’s 30-day long rotation. This image shows the famous circumstellar disc of debris and dust orbiting the star Beta Pictoris 63.4 light years away. An older disk, disturbed by planets that might be orbiting Beta Pictoris, would not be as flat and much of the leftover debris would be ejected into interstellar space. Imaging the Circumstellar Disc around Beta Pictoris with Amateur Equipment This image shows the famous circumstellar disc of debris and dust orbiting the star Beta Pictoris 63.4 light years away. Beta Pictoris (β Pictoris) is the second brightest star in the constellation Pictor, about 63 light years away from Earth.. The recent Hubble Advanced Camera for Surveys view – the best visible-light image of Beta Pictoris – clearly shows a distinct secondary disk that is tilted by about 4 degrees from the main disk. Beta Pictoris is a bluish-white dwarf star eight times brighter than our sun. Beta Pictoris' Inner Disk in Polarized Light and New Orbital Parameters for Beta Pictoris b. Millar-Blanchaer, M. A. et al. For the planet, beta Pictoris c, the outcome is surprising: Even though it may have a similar mass as its sister planet beta Pictoris b, its brightness is lower by a factor 6. The Inner Disk Structure, Disk-Planet Interactions, and Temporal Evolution in the β Pictoris System: A … Optical images (0.5 microns) show the disk because dust reflects light from the central star and towards the observer. July 26, 2006 S cientists using the Hubble Space Telescope's Advanced Camera for Surveys imaged a second disk of dust surrounding nearby star Beta Pictoris. The bright star beta Pictoris is visible in the Southern Hemisphere and has the brightest, most extended dust disk of any nearby star. Since then, Beta Pictoris has been an object of intense scrutiny with Hubble and ground-based telescopes. 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