Hubble Gets Best View of a Circumstellar Debris Disk Distorted by a Planet

HubbleSite NewsCenter -- Latest News Releases: Get larger image formats Over a decade before planets were found orbiting normal stars, the astronomy world was intrigued by the discovery of a vast, edge-on, pancake-flat disk of dust and gas encircling the newborn star Beta Pictoris. It appeared to validate the hypothesis by the German philosopher Immanuel Kant, 230 years ago, that our solar system was born when planets condensed from nebular material in the plane of such a disk. (This model was i...