Oct 15 1984
From The Space Library
NASA announced that astronomers Dr. Bradford A. Smith of the University of Arizona, Tucson, and Dr. Richard J. Terrile of JPL had photographed a vast swarm of solid particles, called a circumstellar disk, surrounding Beta Pictoris, a star 50 light years from Earth. The disk was the first of its kind to be seen clearly in astronomical photographs and could indicate a possible solar system around Beta Pictoris. To make the observations, the astronomers used a 100-inch telescope at the Las Campanas Observatory near La Serena, Chile, operated by the Carnegie Institution of Washington, D.C. A charged-coupled device electronic camera and a coronagraph were attached to the telescope.
The two astronomers had turned attention to Beta Pictoris because of an IRAS science team's reports earlier in the year that stated that the star, and three others similar to it, showed abnormal amounts of infrared radiation, implying the existence of solid material orbiting the stars.
Scientists believed that the circumstellar disk was made up of countless particles, ranging in size from tiny grains less than a thousandth of an inch (10 microns) in diameter to the nuclei of comets a few miles across. the most likely composition included ice, silicates, and carbonaceous (organic) compounds, the same materials from which the Earth and other planets of the solar system were believed to have formed.
Questions to be answered were whether Beta Pictoris had existed long enough for planets to have formed and whether large planetary bodies would necessarily form, even when the required materials were present. (NASA Release 84-146)
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