49 Ceti and Beta Pictoris tagged posts

This is an artist’s impression of gas generation from the collision between objects in a debris disk. Credit: RIKEN

By examining the atomic carbon line from 2 young star systems – 49 Ceti and Beta Pictoris – researchers had found atomic carbon in the disk, the first time this observation has been made at sub-millimeter wavelength, hinting that the gas in debris disks is not primordial, but rather is generated from some process of collisions taking place in the debris disk. Many young stars, as well as more middle-aged stars like our sun, have “debris disks” – like the Oort Cloud in our own solar system – that are believed to be remnants of the system’s formation. Recently, radio observations have detected gas within a number of such discs, but it was not clear why the gas was there...