Credit: NASA, ESA, and D. Apai and G. Schneider (University of Arizona)
The photo at the bottom is the most detailed picture to date of a large, edge-on,
gas-and-dust disk encircling the 20-million-year-old star Beta Pictoris. The new
visible-light Hubble image traces the disk in closer to the star to within about 650
million miles of the star (which is inside the radius of Saturn's orbit about the Sun). When comparing the latest images to Hubble images taken in 1997 (top), astronomers find that the disk's dust distribution has barely changed over 15
years despite the fact that the entire structure is orbiting the star like a carousel. The Hubble Space Telescope photo has been artificially colored to bring out
detail in the disk's structure.