You think you know someone, then you see them in a slightly different way and it surprises you. Of course, I’m not talking about anyone else, I’m talking about a magnificent star who has been studied and filmed many times. Beta Pictoris has been shown to host an extremely surprising disk that has been discovered by many telescopes, even the Hubble telescope. Enter the James Webb Space Telescope and WALLOP; With increased sensitivity and instrumentation comes an exciting new feature.

Beta Pictoris is the second brightest star in the southern constellation of Painter. Believed to be about 20 million years old and just 63 light-years away, this very young star is in our cosmic backyard.

Observations in 1984 showed that Painter Beta has the most surprising dust disk from which planets form. The European Southern Observatory has since confirmed the existence of at least two planets (possibly named Beta Pictoris b and Beta Pictoris c) orbiting within the dust disk. Beta Pictoris has been the target of many observations over the years, including the Hubble Space Telescope (HST), which discovered a second, previously unseen disk.

The second disk is slightly tilted towards the first, but subsequent observations with the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) have revealed a new structure for this second disk.

A team led by Isabelle Rebollido from the Center for Astrobiology in Spain used JWST’s Near Infrared (NIRI) and Mid-Infrared (MIRI) instruments to examine the disks of Beta Pictoris in more detail. They were surprised to find a new structure angled into the cat-tail-shaped secondary disc. Despite many previous observations, including space-fracturing HST data, instruments at JWST are more sensitive and have higher resolution.

“Cat tail” wasn’t the only surprise. When MIRI data is examined, the fact that the two disks have different temperatures shows that they are composed of different materials. The secondary disk and Cat Tail have been shown to be hotter than the primary disk.

It is also easy to conclude that they are both made of dark material, as they have not been observed before in visible or near-infrared light, but are bright in the mid-infrared.

One theory explaining the high temperature is that the material is very porous, perhaps similar to material found in comets and asteroids. The nature of the dust is probably an easy question to answer; The nature and origin of the Cat’s Tail is a little more difficult to answer.

The team explored a number of possible hypotheses that could explain the shape of the tail, but could not agree on a satisfactory model. One of their favorite theories is that the tail is the result of an event that occurred in the disk about a hundred years ago!

The event may be a collision that causes the dust to follow a trajectory that mirrors the orbit of the impactor, but then begins to spread out in a curve. A contributing factor may be the angle of the tail from our perspective, causing the angle of the tail to appear steeper than it actually is.

One thing is certain: recent observations of Beta Pictoris have revealed some surprises about a much-loved and observed object. Further research will help us understand these new properties more comprehensively, but it makes me wonder what other objects we are familiar with still hold some surprises.