Skip to main content

Boulevard of Broken Rings

Credit: ESO/Perrot


This Picture illustrates the remarkable capabilities of SPHERE (the Spectro-Polarimetric High-contrast Exoplanet REsearch instrument), a planet-hunting instrument mounted on ESO's Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile: It shows a series of broken rings of dust around a nearby star. These concentric rings are located in the inner region of the debris disc surrounding a young star named HD 141569A, which sits some 370 light-years away from us.

In this image we see what is known as a transition disc, a short-lived stage between the protoplanetary phase, when planets have not yet formed, and a later time when planets have coalesced, leaving the disc populated only by any remaining - and predominantly dusty - debris.

What we see here are structures formed of dust, revealed for the first time in near-infrared light by SPHERE - at a high enough resolution to capture remarkable detail! The area shown in this image has a diameter of just 200 times the Earth–Sun distance.

Several features are visible, including a bright, prominent ring with well-defined edges - so asymmetric that it appears as a half-ring - multiple clumps, several concentric ringlets, and a pattern akin to a spiral arm. It is significant that these structures are asymmetric; this may reflect an uneven, or clumpy, distribution of dust in the disc, something for which astronomers do not currently have a firm explanation. It is possible that this phenomenon is caused by the presence of planets, but so far no planets of sufficient size to do this have been found in this system.

Links

  • Research paper - C. Perrot et al., Discovery of concentric broken rings at sub-arcsec separations in the HD 141569A gas-rich, debris disk with VLT/SPHERE.

 Text Credit: ESO


Etichette:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

ORBITAL PERIODS OF THE PLANETS

For orbital period generally we refer to the sidereal period, that is the temporal cycle that it takes an object to make a full orbit, relative to the stars. This is the orbital period in an inertial (non-rotating) frame of reference (365,25 days for the earth).
Post a Comment
Read more

NEW WATER MASER IN S0 GALAXY IRAS 15480-0344

Image: Colour composite image of Centaurus A, revealing the lobes and jets emanating from the active galaxy’s central black hole. This is a composite of images obtained with three instruments, operating at very different wavelengths. The 870-micron submillimetre data, from LABOCA on APEX, are shown in orange. X-ray data from the Chandra X-ray Observatory are shown in blue. Visible light data from the Wide Field Imager (WFI) on the MPG/ESO 2.2 m telescope located at La Silla, Chile, show the background stars and the galaxy’s characteristic dust lane in close to "true colour". Credit: ESO/WFI (Optical); MPIfR/ESO/APEX/A.Weiss et al. (Submillimetre); NASA/CXC/CfA/R.Kraft et al. (X-ray) A maser, an acronym for 'microwave amplification by stimulated emission of radiation', is a device that produces coherent electromagnetic waves through amplification by stimulated emission. The maser was the forerunner of the laser: they work by the same principle. The difference is
Post a Comment
Read more

THE HITCHCHIKER'S GUIDE TO THE LOCAL SUPERCLUSTER

Image: Virgo Supercluster. Credit: Andrew Z. Colvin The Virgo Supercluster is a region with a diameter of 33 megaparsecs (~1000 times larger the Milky Way's diameter) containing at least 100 galaxy groups and clusters.
Post a Comment
Read more