#circumstellar disk

[chibinotan]

Young Star and Dust Disk

[wigmund]

From SpaceTelescope.Org Picture of the Week; May 29, 2017:

Viewing the Vermin Galaxy

The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope is famous for its jaw-dropping snapshots of the cosmos. At first glance this Picture of the Week appears to be quite the opposite, showing just a blur of jagged spikes, speckled noise, and weird, clashing colours — but once you know what you are looking at, images like this one are no less breathtaking.

This shows a distant galaxy — visible as the smudge to the lower right — as it begins to align with and pass behind a star sitting nearer to us within the Milky Way. This is an event known as a transit. The star is called HD 107146, and it sits at the centre of the frame. Its light has been blocked in this image to make its immediate surroundings and the faint galaxy visible — the position of the star is marked with a green circle.

The concentric orange circle surrounding HD 107146 is a circumstellar disc — a disc of debris orbiting the star. In the case of HD 107146 we see the disc face-on. As this star very much resembles our Sun, it is an interesting scientific target to study: its circumstellar disc could be analogous to the asteroids in our Solar System and the Kuiper belt.

A detailed study of this system is possible because of the much more distant galaxy — nicknamed the “Vermin Galaxy” by some to reflect their annoyance at its presence — as the star passes in front of it. The unusual pairing was first observed in 2004 by Hubble’s Advanced Camera for Surveys, and again in 2011 by Hubble’s Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph. The latter image is shown here, as the Vermin Galaxy began its transit behind HD 107146. The galaxy will not be fully obscured until around 2020, but interesting science can be done even while the galaxy is only partly obscured. Light from the galaxy will pass through the star’s debris discs before reaching our telescopes, allowing us to study the properties of the light and how it changes, and thus infer the characteristics of the disc itself.

Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA

[chibinotan]

Star’s Disk

[netmassimo]

An article accepted for publication in 'The Astrophysical Journal' reports a study on the binary system cataloged as SVS 13

An article accepted for publication in "The Astrophysical Journal" reports a study on the binary system cataloged as SVS 13, consisting of two protostars surrounded by disks of materials that could lead to the formation of planets. A team of researchers used thirty years of observations conducted with the VLA and new observations conducted with the ALMA radio telescope to obtain a detailed picture of the situation. The conclusion is that each of the two protostars has its own circumstellar disk and that there's a third disk of the circumbinary type that orbits both stars. The analysis of the data also led to the identification of nearly thirty molecules in the SVS 13 system including thirteen complex organic molecules precursors of life.

[chibinotan]

Debris Disc

[americaspace]

Kepler Observes White Dwarf Star Disintegrating its Planet(s)

Kepler Observes White Dwarf Star Disintegrating its Planet(s)

An artist’s concept of a minor planet being disintegrated by a white dwarf star. New observations by NASA’s Kepler space telescope have indicated that this indeed takes place around WD 1145+017, a white dwarf located 570 light-years away. Image Credit: CfA/Mark A. Garlick One of the wonderful things of living in galaxy that is populated by hundreds of billions of stars is that it provides us with…

View On WordPress

[mitchbattros]

Mysterious Ripples Found Racing Through Planet-Forming Disk

Mysterious Ripples Found Racing Through Planet-Forming Disk

Astronomers using NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope and the European Southern Observatory’s (ESO) Very Large Telescope in Chile have discovered never-before-seen moving features within the dusty disk surrounding the young, nearby star AU Microscopii (AU Mic).

The fast-moving, wave-like structures are unlike anything ever observed in a circumstellar disk, said researchers of a new analysis. This new,…

View On WordPress

[americaspace]

Astronomers Get Rare Glimpse of the 'Nasty' Lifestyles of Massive Stars

Astronomers Get Rare Glimpse of the ‘Nasty’ Lifestyles of Massive Stars

Artist’s illustration of the vast disk of gas surrounding the massive and bright Wolf-Rayet star NaSt1, affectionately nicknamed ‘Nasty 1′. Observations with the Hubble and Chandra space telescopes revealed that contrary to other Wolf-Rayet stars, NaSt1 is feeding material into its companion star (shown here by the bridge of bright material connecting the two stars), while some of it escapes into…

View On WordPress