Beta Pictoris: Icy Debris Suggests 'Shepherd' Planet

A vast belt of carbon monoxide located at the fringes of the Beta Pictoris system is concentrated in a single clump located about 8 billion miles from the star, or nearly three times the distance between the planet Neptune and our sun. The total amount of CO observed exceeds 200 million billion tons, equivalent to about one-sixth the mass of Earth's oceans. The presence of all this gas is interesting because ultraviolet starlight breaks up CO molecules in about 100 years, much faster than the main cloud can complete a single orbit around the star. read more

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