Astronomy Picture of the Week – Beta Pictoris B


Finding a link with a .tiff file for this one has been… hard… but it’s still really cool.

This is NOT an artist’s rendering. This is a direct image of an exoplanet, Beta Pictoris B:

Beta Pictoris B orbiting its star

Beta Pictoris B orbiting its star

Beta Pictoris, the star, is the large, blurred out circle in the middle. Beta Pictoris B is the small, light, pixelated circle at the bottom right of the star.

How cool is this?

Comments

  1. DonDueed says

    Actually, it’s pretty darned hot -- 1700 Kelvin (over 2400F), even though it’s pretty far from the star. It’s a super Jupiter, and almost big enough to be a brown dwarf.

  2. Scr... Archivist says

    Hi, Nathan. Thank you for sharing this amazing image.

    By the way, as I understand it, the letter after a star’s name is capitalized if it identifies another star. For an exoplanet it should be lower-case. (Even though that does look weird.)

  3. says

    Thanks for the info! I’ll fix that. BTW… may I inquire as to your username? The reason is this… I’m participating in a YouTube series/ARG called TribeTwelve, and one of the characters that recently began giving us puzzles to solve is Scriniarii the Archivist.

    So of course I’m just a bit curious…

  4. StevoR says

    Beta Pictoris is marvelous but I think Fomalhaut is even better :

    http://www.space.com/22947-fomalhaut.html

    As the iconic “Saurons eye” image and is also brighter and easier to see especially for those in the northern hemisphere. (Where I gather it is still fairly southerly but less so than the constellation of Pictor.)

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