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Led by Alain Lecavelier des Etangs of the Paris Institute of Astrophysics, an international team of eleven researchers has discovered in one fell swoop thirty new exocomets in a newly formed planetary system. The precision of the observations was such that scientists were even able to determine the size of cometary nuclei, which range from 3 to 14 km in diameter. The finding has just been published in ‘Scientific Reports’.
Lecavelier and his colleagues observed comets in the nascent system surrounding Beta Pictoris, a very young star about 60 light-years from Earth and less than 20 million years old. For three decades now, Beta Pictoris It fascinates astronomers because it allows them to observe a solar system similar to ours in the midst of formation.
Two young planets have already been discovered around the star, and the first comets in the system were found in 1987. Those were the first comets observed around a star other than the Sun.
Estimate the distribution
On this occasion, 30 exocomets have been observed at once, something that certainly does not happen every day. Thanks to this, scientists were also able to estimate the size distribution of objects, that is, the ratio of small comets to large ones, something that had not been done before outside our Solar System. Surprisingly, the results of the work show that the distribution of comets is very similar to that of those that orbit the Sun.
As happened in our own Solar System more than 4,000 million years ago, the exocomets of Beta Pictoris were formed as a result of a series of collisions and breakups of larger bodies. Studying the origin and evolution of comets in other planetary systems is of great interest, since part of the Earth’s water probably comes from intense cometary bombardment of the primitive Earth.
The results obtained by the researchers are the result of 156 days of observation (since 2018) of Beta Pictoris with NASA’s TESS satellite (Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, or Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite). New observations with the James Webb Space Telescope will undoubtedly allow more information to be obtained in the future.
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