A long trail of material extending from the debris disk around Beta Pictoris may be the aftermath of a collision between two large bodies, each roughly comparable in size to Pluto, astronomers say. The feature, nicknamed the Cat’s Tail, lies in a planetary system about 63 light-years from Earth and is long enough to wrap around the Sun–Earth system roughly 500 times.
Using 14 years of observations from the Hubble Space Telescope, the team investigated how the feature formed. Beta Pictoris is only a few million years old, much younger than the roughly 4.6-billion-year-old solar system. Its youth means collisions between planetary bodies are still taking place, offering researchers a way to study processes that occurred during the early history of our own system.
The Cat’s Tail had previously been detected with the James Webb Space Telescope in infrared light, but it was not visible at shorter wavelengths. The researchers suggest that its composition helps explain why: the material is largely carbon-based and absorbs visible light.
Hubble’s observations also indicate that the debris grains are extremely porous. The researchers say one possible explanation is that high-speed collisions vaporized carbon grains, which later cooled and condensed into porous material. How such small grains acquired this structure remains unclear.
The team also identified a bend, or warp, in the tail that may result from an interaction with Beta Pictoris b, a gas giant described as 10 times more massive than Jupiter. The researchers say the feature provides evidence of how a giant planet’s gravity can influence nearby dust and icy bodies. The study was published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters last month.
Sources: Space.com.