Beta Pictoris is a fairly young star cosmically speaking. It is only about 20 million years old. It also provides the best opportunity to date for astronomers to study planet formation around a young star.

The formation of our own solar system is believed to have begun with a cloud of dust and debris surrounding the sun. Slowly, over many millions of years, dust particles were pulled together by gravity. The more the clusters of dust grew the more violent the impacts.

Eventually the largest collections of dust formed planets, in stable orbits at considerable distance from one another. The leftovers accumulated in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter and in the Kuiper Belt and the Oort Cloud beyond Neptune. Smaller bits of remaining dust and debris float among the planets in the form of asteroids, comets and meteors.

When it was discovered, in 1984, Beta Pictoris was the first star known to be surrounded by a bright disk of dust and debris. It also has a giant planet, discovered in 2009, embedded and clearly visible in the debris disk. Because the planet, which is only 63 light years away, seems to parallel theories about our own early solar system in many ways it has been an object of intense scrutiny with Hubble and ground-based telescopes since its discovery.

The planet, which orbits Beta Pictorous, every 18 to 20 years allows scientists to study in a kind of slow motion how the large planet distorts the gas and dust cloud around its star.

New visible-light Hubble images, trace the dust and gas disk to within 650 million miles of the star. The planet orbits at 900 million miles and was imaged by the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope six years ago.

“Some computer simulations predicted a complicated structure for the inner disk due to the gravitational pull by the giant planet. The new images reveal the inner disk and confirm the predicted structures. This finding validates models that will help us to deduce the presence of other exoplanets in other disks,” said Daniel Apai of the University of Arizona, Tucson in a statement.

These structures mentioned by Apai include a warp caused by the enormous planet in the inner disk.

When the 2012 images are compared to the 1997 Hubble images astronomers not little change in the distribution of gas and dust in the disk. This indicates that over the 15 year span the disk’s structure remained smooth and continuous which is not unexpected given the timelines of planet formation.

Researchers note that the disk appears especially dusty, which could be caused by collisions between planet and asteroid sized objects in the disk.

Since the discovery of Beta Pictoris, two-dozen light scattering disks have been viewed by hubble. However because it is the closest and brightest, Beta Pictoris remains the best example of a young planetary system for astronomers to study.

When the James Webb Space Telescope launches in 2018 followed by the European Extremely Large Telescope in 2024 researchers should get an even better view of the processes in action around Beta Pictoris.

Images taken of Beta Pictoris, it’s dust and gas cloud and large planet are available on the NASA website.