Image:Debris disk AU Mic HST.jpg

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Description

The top view, taken with NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, shows light reflected off dust in a debris disk around the young star AU Microscopii. The bottom frame labels features in this image, while the white lines on the disk indicate the light polarization direction.

The image shows the flattened disk, appearing like Saturn's rings, but seen almost exactly edge-on. Normally, starlight would be so bright that the debris disk could not be seen. But astronomers used the coronagraph on Hubble's Advanced Camera for Surveys, which blocked out most of the starlight. The black circle in the center of the image is the coronagraph's occulting disk. The disk in this image extends to about 8 billion miles from the star, or three times farther than Neptune is from the Sun. In other observations, the disk has been traced to at least 11 billion miles.
Source

http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/archive/releases/2007/02/image/a/
Date

Hubble image taken Aug. 1, 2004.
Author

NASA, ESA, J. R. Graham and P. Kalas (University of California, Berkeley), and B. Matthews (Hertzberg Institute of Astrophysics)
Permission

http://hubblesite.org/copyright/

[edit] Licensing

Public domain This file is in the public domain because it was created by NASA. NASA copyright policy states that "NASA material is not protected by copyright unless noted". (NASA copyright policy page or JPL Image Use Policy).

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