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Beta Pictoris


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The debris ring around Beta Pictoris. Image credit: European Southern Observatory

One of the first debris disks ever detected outside the Solar System surrounds the bright blue-white star Beta Pictoris, located at a distance of 19.3 parsecs (63 light years). This is the first photographic image of the Beta Pictoris disk, demonstrating that we see it almost edge-on. The circular shape at the center is an artifact of the mask used to filter out the star's glare, which would otherwise render the debris undetectable. With an estimated age of about 12 million years, Beta Pictoris is one of the youngest nearby stars. In 2008, a team of astronomers led by Anne-Marie Lagrange imaged an exoplanet candidate at a small separation from the central star. This object has a proposed semimajor axis of 8 AU and an estimated mass of 8 Mjup.





Debris belts and colliding planetesimals around Beta Pictoris. Image credit: ISAS/JAXA

This artist's impression of the Beta Pictoris system represents the ring-like distribution of its debris, as established by a series of investigations. This illustration accompanied news accounts of a study by Okamoto and colleagues that argued for the presence of a nascent planetary system within several AU of the star (Okamoto et al. 2004). See their abstract; see also this representative news story.





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1 		AU Microscopii Debris Disk
2 		Espilon Eridani Debris Rings
3 		HD 69830 Debris Belt
4 		Beta Pictoris Debris Disk
5 		Fomalhaut and Vega
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