The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has seen Beta Pictoris like never before, capturing a never-before-seen structure that gives the young planetary system a dusty cat tail.
Located 63 light-years away from us, Beta Pictoris is a star about twice the size of the Sun and eight times brighter; It is surrounded by a disk of gas and dust in which there is evidence of planets forming.
Beta Pictoris was the first planetary system in which astronomers detected a dusty disk of material formed from debris from collisions of asteroids and planetoids during the system’s violent formative years. Following this, astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope detected a second disk of debris and material in the Beta Pictoris system.
Now a team of astronomers using the JWST instruments – the Near Infrared Camera (NIRCam) and the Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI) – have discovered another layer of structure in the system, in the form of a sharply inclined dust branch extending from the southwest. Part of the secondary debris disk.
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“Beta Pictoris is the debris disk that has it all: It has a really bright, nearby star that we can study very well,” study team leader Isabel Rebollido, a scientist at the Center for Astrobiology in Spain, said in a statement. she said.
“Although there have been previous observations from the ground in this wavelength range, they did not have the sensitivity and spatial resolution that we have now with JWST, so they were not able to detect this feature,” Rebollido added.
Beta Pictoris’s cat’s tail only appeared on the MIRI instrument because it shines brightest in mid-infrared light, perhaps explaining why it was previously overlooked.
Rebollido and his team also noticed another feature of Beta Pictoris. They saw a temperature difference between the two disks of the planetary system, indicating that they may have different compositions.
“We did not expect JWST to reveal that there are two different types of material around Beta Pictoris, but MIRI clearly showed us that the material in the secondary disk and the cat’s tail is hotter than the main disk,” study co-author Christopher said. Stark, from NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, also made the same statement. “The dust that makes up the disk and tail must be very dark, so we can’t easily see it in visible or near-infrared wavelengths – but it shines in the mid-infrared.”
The team proposes that the higher-temperature disk consists of a dark, highly porous material known as “organic refractory material,” similar to that seen on the surfaces of comets and asteroids in our solar system.
What causes the curl in the cosmic cat’s tail?
While animal behaviorists think cats put a curve on their vertically extended tails as a greeting or to indicate friendliness or playfulness, Rebollido and his colleagues aren’t sure what gives this cosmic cat’s tail its shape. This curved feature is not something seen in disks of material from other planetary natal systems.
To solve this cat’s cradle puzzle, the team modeled various scenarios that attempted to recreate the cat’s tail structure and thus explain its origin.
“The cat’s tail feature is quite unusual, and the curvature was difficult to recreate with a dynamic model,” Stark explained. “Our model requires powder that can be pushed out of the system extremely quickly, which again suggests that it is made of organic refractory material.”
This research led the team to determine that the cat’s tail resulted from a dust-generating event that occurred just 100 years ago from our perspective on Earth.
“Something like a collision happens and a lot of dust is created,” said study co-author Marshall Perrin of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore. “At first the dust travels in the same orbital direction as its source, but then it begins to spread.”
Perrin added that light from the star pushes the smallest, softest dust particles away from the star faster, while larger grains are harder to slide and therefore do not move as much, creating a long dust swirl.
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As for the sharp angle at which the dust tail emerges from the debris disk, Rebollido and his colleagues think this is simply an optical illusion caused by the angle at which JWST observes Beta Pictoris. The actual angle at which the dust trail extends from the debris disk is only 5 degrees.
Taking into account the brightness of this newly discovered feature, astronomers were also able to determine that the dust in the tail is equivalent to the mass of an average asteroid spanning approximately 9.9 billion miles in the main belt between Jupiter and Mars. miles (16 billion kilometers).
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The dust formation phenomenon that gives Beta Pictoris its feline character may also be responsible for another interesting feature of the system. Researchers think the same collision may be the cause of the asymmetry in Beta Pictoris previously observed by the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) in 2014.
This asymmetry takes the form of a mound of carbon monoxide near the cat’s tail. Since it would not take more than a century for radiation from the central star to break down this mass of carbon monoxide, the continued concentration of gas may also be evidence of the same phenomenon.
“Our research shows that Beta Pic may be more active and chaotic than we previously thought,” Stark concluded. “JWST continues to surprise us even when looking at the best-studied objects. We have a completely new window into these planetary systems.”
The team’s research was presented this week at the 243rd meeting of the American Astronomical Society in New Orleans.