Former postdoctoral Fellow Aki Roberge, now at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, is the lead author on a June 8 Nature paper, entitled, “Stabilization of the disk around Beta Pictoris by extremely carbon-rich gas.” Roberge and her research team, including Alycia Weinberger, detected unusually high quantities of carbon in an infant (between 8 and 20 million years old) solar system around the star Beta Pictoris, nearly 63 light-years away. These discoveries were made possible by NASA’s Far Ultraviolet Spectroscopic Explorer (FUSE) and data from the Hubble Space Telescope’s imaging spectrograph. Previous studies indicated that the gases around Beta Pictoris—a star two times the size of our Sun—had an elemental composition very similar to our solar system, this new research casts that conclusion in doubt.

Roberge comments, “For years we’ve looked to this early forming solar system as one that might be going through the same processes our own solar system did when the rocky planets, including Earth, were forming…but we got a big surprise—there is much more carbon gas than we expected, something very different is going on.” The researchers’ paper suggests that either carbon-rich asteroids or comets, unlike any in our own solar system, have vaporized, or that bodies outgassing carbon-bearing species such as methane contribute to the carbon excess.

The data, however do not seem to answer how the carbon got there in the first place. Weinberger noted in a EurekAlert! press release, “If we could figure out how carbon-rich the dust near the star is, which may be possible with future large infrared telescopes, we could figure out if the dust is a plausible source or carbon.” To read the full Nature paper, click here. For a NASA press release, click here. To view the current coverage of the story, see Google News.