A new NASA supercomputer simulation of the planet and debris disk around the nearby star Beta Pictoris reveals that the planet’s motion drives spiral waves throughout the disk, a phenomenon that causes collisions among the orbiting debris.
Patterns in the collisions and the resulting dust appear to account for many observed features that previous research has been unable to fully explain.
These images compare a view of Beta Pictoris in scattered light as seen by the Hubble Space Telescope (top) with a similar view constructed from data in the SMACK simulation (red overlay, bottom).
The X pattern in the Hubble image forms as a result of a faint secondary dust disk inclined to the main debris disk.
Previous simulations were unable to reproduce this feature, but the SMACK model replicates the overall pattern because it captures the three-dimensional distribution of the collisions responsible for making the dust.
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