Publication Date:
2014-03-08
Description:
Many stars are surrounded by disks of dusty debris formed in the collisions of asteroids, comets, and dwarf planets, but is gas also released in such events? Observations at submillimeter wavelengths of the archetypal debris disk around beta Pictoris show that 0.3% of a Moon mass of carbon monoxide orbits in its debris belt. The gas distribution is highly asymmetric, with 30% found in a single clump 85 astronomical units from the star, in a plane closely aligned with the orbit of the inner planet, beta Pictoris b. This gas clump delineates a region of enhanced collisions, either from a mean motion resonance with an unseen giant planet or from the remnants of a collision of Mars-mass planets.〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Notes: 〈/span〉Dent, W R F -- Wyatt, M C -- Roberge, A -- Augereau, J-C -- Casassus, S -- Corder, S -- Greaves, J S -- de Gregorio-Monsalvo, I -- Hales, A -- Jackson, A P -- Hughes, A Meredith -- Lagrange, A-M -- Matthews, B -- Wilner, D -- New York, N.Y. -- Science. 2014 Mar 28;343(6178):1490-2. doi: 10.1126/science.1248726. Epub 2014 Mar 6.〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Author address: 〈/span〉Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) Santiago Central Offices, Alonso de Cordova 3107, Vitacura, Casilla 763 0355, Santiago, Chile.〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Record origin:〈/span〉 〈a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24603151" target="_blank"〉PubMed〈/a〉
Print ISSN:
0036-8075
Electronic ISSN:
1095-9203
Topics:
Biology
,
Chemistry and Pharmacology
,
Computer Science
,
Medicine
,
Natural Sciences in General
,
Physics
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