Hubble, Spitzer Telescopes View 'The Moth'

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Hubble, Spitzer Telescopes View 'The Moth'

This near-infrared image, taken with the Near-Infrared Camera and Multi-Object Spectrometer aboard NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, shows the wing-shaped dust disk surrounding the young, nearby star HD 61005. Astronomers have dubbed the star system "The Moth." (NASA/Hines/Schneider)

UA astronomers visualize space dust shaped like a bug with a 22-billion-mile wingspan.

By Lori Stiles, University Communications
January 10, 2008

University of Arizona astronomers Glenn Schneider, Michael Meyer and J. Serena Kim are among scientists who combined images from the UA-led infrared camera on NASA's Hubble Space Telescope with images from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope into a spectacular image of a star's dust disk dubbed "The Moth."

The Moth is making news at a press conference today at the American Astronomical Society meeting in Austin, Texas. The wing-like structure spans about 22 billion miles. It is actually an unusually shaped dusk disk around the nearby young star HD 61005, and it's packed with clues on how planets form and evolve, the researchers say.

Dean Hines of the Space Science Institute in Corrales, N.M., a member of the team the discovered the disk, collaborated with Schneider, Meyer and others in the observations. Hines, Schneider and Meyer give more details in a news release from the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore. The news release is available online.

Hines is a co-investigator on the Spitzer Space Telescope Legacy project called "The Formation and Evolution of Planetary Systems," headed by Meyer. They used Spitzer to detect excess heat radiation around the star – the telltale sign that it has a dust disk.

Schneider is a co-investigator for Hubble's infrared camera, called the Near-Infrared Camera and Multi-Object Spectrometer, or NICMOS. Schneider and Hines led a team who used the NICMOS coronograph to block starlight and revealed never-before-seen details in the dust disk.

"These symbiotic capabilities, uniquely implemented in NASA's Great Observatories, provide astronomers with the powerful observational tools to study the circumstellar environments of potentially planet-forming systems," Schneider said.

"Combining observations from these two spacecraft gives us information about the composition of the dust grains, whether they're icy or sandy, or whether they're like the sooty smoke particles rising from a chimney," Meyer added.

"The composition and sizes of the dust can tell us a lot about the dynamics and evolution of a solar system," he added. "In our solar system, for example, astronomers have evidence of rocks smashing into each other and generating dust, as in the asteroid and Kuiper belts. We're seeing these same processes unfold in other planetary systems."