Beta Pictoris - intersecting disks schematicWithout Text: Detailed images of the nearby star Beta Pictoris, taken by NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, confirm the existence of not one but two dust disks encircling the star. The images offer tantalizing new evidence for at least one Jupiter-size planet orbiting Beta Pictoris. The finding ends a decade of scientific speculation that an odd warp in the young star's debris disk may actually be another inclined disk. The recent Hubble Advanced Camera for Surveys view - the best visible-light image of Beta Pictoris - clearly shows a distinct secondary disk that is tilted by about 4 degrees from the main disk. The secondary disk is visible out to roughly 24 billion miles (about 40 billion kilometres) from the star, and probably extends even farther, said astronomers. This Hubble image of Beta Pictoris clearly shows a primary dust disk and a much fainter secondary dust disk. Astronomers used the Advanced Camera's coronagraph to block out the light from the bright star.

Name: Beta Pictoris
Type: Milky Way : Star : Circumstellar Material : Planetary System
Category: Exoplanets
Distance: 70 light years
Release date: 27 June 2006, 19:00
Credit: NASA, ESA and A. Feild (STScI)

Beta Pictoris - Multi-Band Images of Beta Pictoris: Detailed images of the nearby star Beta Pictoris, taken by NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, confirm the existence of not one but two dust disks encircling the star. The images offer tantalizing new evidence for at least one Jupiter-size planet orbiting Beta Pictoris. The finding ends a decade of scientific speculation that an odd warp in the young star's debris disk may actually be another inclined disk. The recent Hubble Advanced Camera for Surveys view - the best visible-light image of Beta Pictoris - clearly shows a distinct secondary disk that is tilted by about 4 degrees from the main disk. The secondary disk is visible out to roughly 24 billion miles (almost 40 billion kilometres) from the star, and probably extends even farther, said astronomers. This Hubble image of Beta Pictoris clearly shows a primary dust disk and a much fainter secondary dust disk. Astronomers used the Advanced Camera's coronagraph to block out the light from the bright star.

Name: Beta Pictoris
Type: Milky Way : Star : Circumstellar Material : Planetary System
Category: Exoplanets
Distance: 70 light years
Release date: 27 June 2006, 19:00
Credit: NASA, ESA and D. Golimowski (Johns Hopkins University)

Super Star Clusters in Dust-Enshrouded Galaxy: The sharp eye of the Hubble Space Telescope's Advanced Camera for Surveys has uncovered more than 200 mammoth star clusters in the heart of the galaxy Arp 220. The clusters are the bluish-white dots scattered throughout the image. The heftiest Arp 220 cluster - about 10 million solar masses - is twice as massive as any comparable star cluster in the Milky Way Galaxy. Arp 220 collided with another galaxy about 700 million years ago, fueling the frenzy of star birth in a small region about 5,000 light-years across. The galaxy is a nearby example of the aftermath of two colliding galaxies.

Name: Arp 220, IC 4553
Type: Local Universe : Galaxy : Activity : AGN : Seyfert
Category: Galaxies
Constellation: Serpens Caput
Distance: 250 million light years
Release date: 13 June 2006, 19:00
Credit: NASA, ESA, and The Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)

Extraterrestrial fireworks: In the wake of Independence Day festivities surrounding the U.S. July 4th holiday, astronomers and image processors at the Space Telescope Science Institute are releasing the Hubble Space Telescope image of a cosmic explosion that is quite similar to fireworks on Earth. In the nearby galaxy, the Small Magellanic Cloud, a massive star has exploded as a supernova, and begun to dissipate its interior into a spectacular display of colorful filaments. The supernova remnant (SNR), known as "E0102" for short, is the greenish-blue shell of debris just below the center of the Hubble image. Its name is derived from its cataloged placement (or coordinates) in the celestial sphere. More formally known as 1E0102.2-7219, it is located almost 50 light-years (15 parsecs) away from of the edge of the massive star-forming region, N 76, also known as Henize 1956 in the Small Magellanic Cloud. This delicate structure glowing a multitude of lavenders and peach hues, resides in the upper right of the image. The composition and thus, the coloring, of the diffuse remnant in comparison to its star-forming neighbor is due to the presence of very large quantities of oxygen compared to hydrogen. E0102 is a member of the oxygen-rich class of SNRs showing strong oxygen and other more metal-like abundances in its optical and X-ray spectra, and an absence of hydrogen and helium. N 76 in contrast is made up primarily of glowing hydrogen emission. One explanation for the abundance of oxygen in the SNR is that the parent star was very large and old, and had blown away most its hydrogen as stellar wind before it exploded. It is surmised that the progenitor star that caused the supernova explosion may have been a Wolf-Rayet. These stars, which can be upward of 20 times the mass of the sun and tens of thousands times more luminous, are famous for having a strong stellar wind throughout their lifetime. This stellar wind carried off material from the outer-most shells of the star (the hydrogen and helium shells), leaving the next most abundant element, oxygen, as a visible signature after the star exploded as a supernova. Determined to be only about 2000 years old, E0102 is relatively young on astronomical scales and is just beginning its interactions with the nearby interstellar medium. Young supernova remnants like E0102 allow astronomers to examine material from the cores of massive stars directly. This in turn gives insight on how stars form, their composition, and the chemical enrichment of the surrounding area. As well, young remnants are a great learning tool to better understand the physics of supernova explosions. E0102 was observed in 2003 with the Hubble Advanced Camera for Surveys. Four filters that isolate light from blue, visible, and infrared wavelengths and hydrogen emission were combined with oxygen emission images of the SNR taken with the Wide Field Planetary Camera 2 in 1995. The Small Magellanic Cloud is a nearby dwarf galaxy to our own Milky Way. It is visible in the Southern Hemisphere, in the direction of the constellation Tucana, and lies roughly 210,000 light-years (65 000 parsecs) distant.

Name: 1E 0102.2-7219, E0102
Type: Local Universe : Nebula : Type : Supernova Remnant
Category: Nebulae
Constellation: Tucana
Distance: 200000 light years
Release date: 31 July 2006, 15:00
Credit: NASA, ESA and the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)