Potential Comets & Water Vapor Around Beta Pic
Interesting things are happening around the beloved Beta Pic. Bands of unexpected gas may be due to cometary collisions – but are these potential comets similar to our own?
Proxima Centauri sports a fancy dust ring
Astronomers using ALMA have just discovered that our closest neighbor has at least one dust ring, analog to the Kuiper belt in the solar system. Sorry, but a reference to Lord of the Rings is unavoidable.
A Ring of Ice and Glows (around Fomalhaut)
ALMA has taken a brand-new image of Fomalhaut’s famous debris disk. What can we learn from it?
A New Glow in the Eye of Sauron
Folmahaut’s debris disk has been observed to have an unusual brightening in millimeter wavelengths.
WISE-ing up to broken planets
How do planets meet their ends? For many of the smallest worlds, it maybe as a debris disc strewn around the tiny white dwarf that is all that is left of their stars. The faint infrared glow from nearly forty such discs have been discovered, their rocky origins given away by the chemical composition of the material falling onto the parent white dwarf. Today’s paper adds another disc to the sample, although not without difficulty.
Weathering the storm or rising from the ashes? The circumbinary planets of NN Serpentis
NN Serpentis has everything: a white dwarf + main sequence binary system that is believed to contain two planets and, now, a disc of debris.