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 Beta
Pictoris Disk Hides Giant Elliptical Ring System
[Left]
A NASA Hubble Space Telescope false-color, visible-light picture
of one side of the edge-on dust disk around the star Beta Pictoris.
Knots in the disk (marked A,B,C,D) are interpreted as rings of dust,
seen edge-on.
Image credit: NASA and Paul Kalas (Space
Telescope Science Institute)
[Right]
A still frame from a computer simulation, which shows a circumstellar
dust disk highly perturbed by the gravitational pull of a bypassing
star. The gray solid area represents the initial shape and size
of the undisturbed disk. In the simulation, the gravity of the passing
star rearranges the orbit of each particle, setting up an elliptical
ring system that may have survived for the last 100,000 years since
the impact occurred.
Simulation courtesy: John Larwood (Queen Mary and
Westfield College, London, United Kingdom)
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Beta
Pictoris Disk Hides Giant Elliptical Ring System
