Beta Pictoris Gives Up More Secrets
(From the September/October
2006 issue of StarDate magazine)
The southern-hemisphere star Beta Pictoris was one of the first
found to have a disk of possibly planet-forming material circling
it. Now astronomers using Hubble Space Telescope seem to have
found a second dust disk around the star (indicated below by
a dotted line), much fainter than and tilted several degrees
to the main disk. This secondary disk may harbor a second planet,
perhaps 20 times as massive as Jupiter. The planet may have formed
the disk by sweeping up the small "building blocks" of
ice and rock known as planetesimals as it orbited Beta Pictoris.
NASA/ESA/D. Golimowski (Johns Hopkins)
» More information about extrasolar planets
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