by The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has seen Beta Pictoris like never before, capturing an unprecedented structure that gives the young planetary system a dusty cat tail.
Located 63 light-years away, Beta Picoris is a star about twice the size of the sun and eight times as bright, surrounded by a disk of gas and dust that contains evidence of planet formation.
Beta Pictoris was the first planetary system in which astronomers observed a dusty disk of material composed of debris caused by collisions between asteroids and planets during the system’s violent formative years. Later, using the Hubble Space Telescope, astronomers observed a second disk of debris and material in the Beta Pictoris system.
Now using JWST’s instruments – the Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam) and the Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI) – a team of astronomers has discovered another layer of structure in the system, in the form of a branch of dust tilted sharply 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 very bright, compact star that we can study very well,” said study team leader Isabel Rebollido, a scientist at the Astrobiology Center in Spain. , in a statement.
“Although there have been previous ground-based observations in this wavelength range, they did not have the sensitivity and spatial resolution that we now have with the JWST, so they did not detect this feature,” Rebollido said.
The cat’s tail of Beta Pictoris was only visible on the MIRI instrument because it shines brightest in mid-infrared light, perhaps also explaining why it was previously missed.
Rebollido and her team also noticed another aspect of Beta Picoris. They observed a difference in temperature 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 Picoris, but MIRI clearly showed us that the material of the secondary disk and the tail of the cat is hotter than the main disk,” said research co-author Christopher Stark, of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, in the same statement. “The dust that forms that disk and tail must be very dark, so we don’t see it easily at visible or near-infrared wavelengths – but in the mid-infrared, it’s glowing.”
The team theorizes that the disk with the hotter temperature is composed of dark, highly porous material similar to that seen on the surface of comets and asteroids in our solar system, known as “organic refractory material.”
What caused the tail of the cosmic cat to sink?
Although animal behaviorists think that cats wag their vertically extended tails as a greeting or to express friendliness or playfulness, Rebollido and his colleagues are not sure what gives this cosmic cat’s tail its shape. This curved feature is not something seen in material discs in other planetary systems.
To solve this cat’s cage puzzle, the team modeled several scenarios to try to recreate the structure of the cat’s tail and explain its origin accordingly.
“The shape of the cat’s tail is very unusual, and it was difficult to reproduce the curvature with a dynamic model,” explained Stark. “Our model requires dust that can be pushed out of the system very quickly, again suggesting that it is made of organic refractory material.”
This investigation led the team to determine that the cat’s tails were likely caused by a dust-producing event that occurred about 100 years ago from our perspective here on Earth.
“Something happens — like a collision — and a lot of dust is produced,” research co-author Marshall Perrin, of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, said in the statement. “At first, the dust goes in the same orbital direction as its source, but then it also starts to spread out.”
Perrin added that the light from the star pushes the smaller, wetter dust particles away from the star faster, while the larger grains are harder to move and therefore don’t move as much, creating a long tendril of dust. .
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As for the sharp angle at which the dust tail radiates from the debris disk, Rebollido and his colleagues think that this is simply an optical illusion caused by the angle at which JWST observed Beta Pictoris. The actual angle at which the dust trail extends from the debris disk is exactly 5 degrees.
Taking into account the brightness of this newly discovered feature, the astronomers were also able to determine that the dust in the tail is equivalent to the mass of an average asteroid in the main belt between Jupiter and Mars to have spread to a distance of about 9.9 billion. miles (16 billion kilometers).
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The dust-forming event that gave Beta Pictoris its feline aspect may also be responsible for another peculiar characteristic of the system. The researchers think that the same collision may have caused an asymmetry in Beta Pictoris previously observed in 2014 by the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA).
This asymmetry consists of a lump of carbon monoxide, which sits with the cat’s tail. As radiation from the central star should not take more than a century to break down this lump of carbon monoxide, the gas concentration may still be witnessing the same event.
“Our research suggests that Beta Pic may be more active and chaotic than we previously thought,” concluded Stark. “The JWST continues to surprise us, even when we look at the most well-studied objects. We have a whole new window into these planetary systems.”
The team’s research was presented this week during the 243rd meeting of the American Astronomical Society in New Orleans.
