Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, K. Lawson (GSFC), J. Schlieder (GSFC), A. Pagan (STScI)

These two images are of the dusty debris disk around AU Mic, a red dwarf star located 32 light-years away in the southern constellation Microscopium. The team used Webb’s Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam) to study AU Mic. NIRCam’s coronagraph, which blocked the intense light of the central star, allowed the team to study the region very close to the star. The location of the star, which is masked out, is marked by a white, graphical representation at the center of each image. The region blocked by the coronagraph is shown by a dashed circle.

Webb provided images at 3.56 microns (top, blue) and 4.44 microns (bottom, red). The team found that the disk was brighter at the shorter or “bluer” wavelength, likely meaning that it contains a lot of fine dust that is more efficient at scattering shorter wavelengths of light.

The NIRCam images allowed the researchers to trace the disk, which spans a diameter of 60 astronomical units (5.6 billion miles), as close to the star as 5 astronomical units (460 million miles) – the equivalent of Jupiter’s orbit in our solar system. The images were more detailed and brighter than the team expected, and scientists were able to image the disk closer to the star than expected.

Provider: Space Telescope Science Institute

Image Source: https://webbtelescope.org/contents/news-releases/2023/news-2023-103

Curator: STScI, Baltimore, MD, USA

Image Use Policy: https://www.stsci.edu/copyright