Two Dust Disks Around Beta Pictoris

Detailed photographs of nearby star Beta Pictoris by the Hubble Space Telescope show that it’s circled by two disks of dust. Astronomers believe that a planet with the mass of Jupiter is using its gravity to sweep up material from the primary disk. Additional material is attracted to the planet, and is shaped into a second disk. The dust disk was first discovered by ground telescopes in 1984, and then seen by Hubble in 1995.

Detailed images of the nearby star Beta Pictoris, taken by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, confirm the existence of not one but two dust disks encircling the star. The images offer tantalizing new evidence for at least one Jupiter-size planet orbiting Beta Pictoris.

The finding ends a decade of speculation that an odd warp in the young star’s debris disk may actually be another inclined disk. 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. The secondary disk is visible out to roughly 24 billion miles from the star, and probably extends even farther, said astronomers.

The finding, by a team of astronomers led by David Golimowski of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Md., appears in the June 2006 issue of the Astronomical Journal. To see the faint disk, astronomers used the Advanced Camera for Surveys’ coronagraph, which blocked the light from Beta Pictoris. The disk is fainter than the star because its dust only reflects light.

The best explanation for the observations is that a suspected unseen planet, about one to 20 times the mass of Jupiter and in an orbit within the secondary disk, is using gravity to sweep up material from the primary disk.

“The Hubble observation shows that it is not simply a warp but two concentrations of dust in two separate disks,” Golimowski said. “The finding suggests that planetary systems could be forming in two different planes. We know this can happen because the planets in our solar system are typically inclined to Earth’s orbit by several degrees. Perhaps stars forming more than one dust disk may be the norm in the formative years of a star system.”

Dynamical computer models by David Mouillet and Jean-Charles Augereau of Grenoble Observatory in France suggest how a secondary dust disk can form. A planet in an inclined orbit gravitationally attracts small bodies of rock and/or ice, called planetesimals, from the main disk, and moves them into an orbit aligned with that of the planet. These perturbed planetesimals then collide with each other, producing the tilted dust disk seen in the new Hubble images.

Astronomers do not know how the planet, if it exists, settled into an inclined orbit. However, computer simulations by multiple research teams show that planet embryos which start out in a very thin plane, can, through gravitation interactions, rapidly scatter into orbits that become inclined to the primary disk. Whatever the process, the four degree inclination of the suspected perturbing planet in Beta Pictoris is not unlike the several degree spread seen in our solar system.

“The actual lifetime of a dust grain is relatively short, maybe a few hundred thousand years,” Golimowski explained. “So the fact that we can still see these disks around a 10- to 20-million-year-old star means that the dust is being replenished by collisions between planetesimals.”

Beta Pictoris is located 63 light-years away in the southern constellation Pictor. Although the star is much younger than the Sun, it is twice as massive and nine times more luminous. Beta Pictoris entered the limelight over 20 years ago when NASA’s Infrared Astronomical Satellite detected excess infrared radiation from the star. Astronomers attributed this excess to the presence of warm circumstellar dust.

The dust disk was first imaged by ground-based telescopes in 1984. Those images showed that the disk is seen nearly edge-on from Earth. Hubble observations in 1995 revealed an apparent warp in the disk.

Subsequent images obtained in 2000 by Hubble’s Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph confirmed the warp. The latter study was led by Sara Heap of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. At that time, Heap and her colleagues suggested that the warp may be a secondary disk tilted about 4 degrees from the main disk. Several teams of astronomers attributed the warp to a planet in a tilted orbit out of the plane of the main disk.

Astronomers using ground-based telescopes also found various asymmetries in the star’s disk. Infrared images taken in 2002 by the Keck II Observatory in Hawaii showed that another, smaller inner disk may exist around the star in a region the size of our solar system. Golimowski’s team did not spot the disk because it is small and is blocked by the Advanced Camera’s coronagraph. This possible inner disk is tilted in the opposite direction from the disk seen in the new Hubble images. This misalignment implies that the tilted disks are not directly related. Nevertheless, they both may bolster evidence for the existence of one or more planets orbiting the star.

Images and more information about Beta Pictoris are available on the Web at: http://hubblesite.org/news/2006/25

The Hubble Space Telescope is an international cooperative project between NASA and the European Space Agency. The Space Telescope Science Institute is operated for NASA by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Inc., Washington.

Original Source: Hubble News Release