Hubble images suggest giant dust cloud near Beta Pictoris may come from a collision
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Astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope have seen the "Cat's Tail," a dark dust structure around the young star system Beta Pictoris, in visible light for the first time. They say it may be the aftermath of a collision between large bodies, though the exact process is uncertain.
A University of Arizona-led team has used NASA's Hubble Space Telescope to image the "Cat's Tail" in visible light for the first time. The structure is a huge cloud of dark material about 63 light-years from Earth, in the constellation Pictor. It is part of the dust and debris disk around Beta Pictoris, a young star system that resembles our own solar system in its early development. It may stretch up to about 1,000 astronomical units, roughly 93 billion miles. The study appears in The Astrophysical Journal Letters and was led by Arin Avsar, with co-authors including Daniel Apai and Kevin Wagner. The team combined the new images with observations spanning more than 14 years.
Avsar says the feature is thought to be the aftermath of a collision between large bodies, something like Pluto. Until now it had been seen only by the James Webb Space Telescope, which detects infrared light. The team suggests the reason is its makeup: almost entirely carbon-based organic refractory material, which absorbs visible light. The dust grains are about a micron across but appear very porous, or "fluffy." Wagner suggests a collision may have vaporized carbon grains that then recondensed as they cooled. The precise process remains uncertain.
Combining Hubble and Webb data with computer modeling, the researchers suggest the structure may extend sideways across the sky, not far behind the star. Hubble also revealed a warp in the star's dust halo, which the team suspects is caused by the gravity of the gas giant Beta Pic b, about 10 times Jupiter's mass.
