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October 8, 2015 IFA News
Dr. Johan Olofsson, an IFA postdoc, forms part of a team of investigators whose paper "Fast-Moving Structures in the Debris Disk Around AU Microscopii” was published in Nature Magazine on October 8, 2015. The work, using images f ESO’s Very Large Telescope and the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, astronomers shows never-before-seen structures within a dusty disc surrounding a nearby star. The fast-moving wave-like features in the disc of the star AU Microscopii are unlike anything ever observed, or even predicted, before now. The origin and nature of these features present a new mystery for astronomers to explore. AU Microscopii lies just 32 light-years away from Earth. The disc essentially comprises asteroids that have collided with such vigour that they have been ground to dust. The edge-on view of the disc complicates the interpretation of its three-dimensional structure. In the image, the top row shows a Hubble image of the AU Mic disc from 2010, the middle row Hubble from 2011 and the bottom row VLT/SPHERE data from 2014. The black central circles show where the brilliant light of the central star has been blocked off to reveal the much fainter disc, and the position of the star is indicated schematically.
Associated links: Nature Magazine Publication
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