Three Comets Orbiting The Nearby Star Beta Pictoris – Found By TESS Mission

Eddie Gonzales Jr. – MessageToEagle.com – Just about a year after the launch, NASA’s mission TESS, discovered the first three comets orbiting the nearby star Beta Pictoris outside our solar system.

The main goal of the mission is to search for exoplanets – planets orbiting other stars.

An artist’s impression of comets orbiting the star Beta Pictoris. image credit: Michaela Pink

The signal of the exocomets was discovered when Sebastian Zieba, Master’s student in the team of Konstanze Zwintz at the Institute of Astro- and Particle Physics at the University of Innsbruck, investigated the TESS light curve of Beta Pictoris in March this year.

“The data showed a significant decrease in the intensity of the light of the observed star. These variations due to darkening by an object in the star’s orbit can clearly be related to a comet,” Sebastian Zieba and Konstanze Zwintz say in a press release.

In collaboration with Matthew Kenworthy from the Leiden University (Netherlands) and Grant Kennedy from the University of Warwick (UK), they analyzed and interpreted the signals of the exocomets.

Recent discovery comes after the detection of three similar exocomets orbiting other stars during data analysis by NASA’s Kepler mission. The researchers suggest that exocomets are more likely to be found around young stars.

“The space telescope Kepler concentrated on older stars similar to the Sun in a relatively small area in the sky. TESS, on the other hand, observes stars all over the sky, including young stars,” says Zwintz.

“We therefore expect further discoveries of this kind in the future. Already in the 1980s, investigations of Beta Pictoris provided convincing evidence for planetary systems around stars other than our Sun – a decade before exoplanets were even discovered for the first time. In addition, there was already indirect evidence for comets at that time based on the characteristic signature of evaporating gas coming off them.”

“At about 23 million years old, Beta Pictoris is a relatively young star, “a young adult star compared to human age.”

The discovery of exocomets around Beta Pictoris was predicted in 1999 in a paper by the astrophysicists Alain Lecavelier des Etangs, Alfred Vidal-Madjar and Roger Ferlet.

The scientists expect to discover many more comets and asteroids in this area, as it are a young star.

Paper

Written by Eddie Gonzales Jr. – MessageToEagle.com Staff Writer