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Beta Pictoris

This image from Webb's MIRI (mid-infrared) camera shows the star system Beta Pictoris. A flat disk of dust fragments, formed by collisions between planetesimals (orange), dominates the landscape and is called the "main disk plane". In the lower left corner, Webb showed the true extent of the secondary disk (cyan (turquoise), which is inclined 5 degrees relative to the primary disk. Webb also discovered a previously unseen feature called the "cat's tail." A coronagraph (a black circle and two small disks) was used to block The light of the central star. Scale bar shows that the disks of Beta Peak (pictoris) span hundreds of astronomical units (AU), where one AU is the average distance from Earth to the Sun. (In our solar system, Neptune orbits the Sun at a distance of 30 AU) in this image , light at a wavelength of 15.5 microns is shown in cyan (turquoise) and 23 microns in orange (F1550C and F2300C filters, respectively). Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, STSCI, C. STARK and K. LAWSON (NASA GSFC), J. KAMMERER (ESO), and M. PERRIN (STSCI).

The Webb Space Telescope discovered a 'cat's tail' made of dust in the Beta Pictoris system

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Beta Pictoris is a solar system in the making and relatively close so that the gas disks can be seen. It turns out that Webb was able to discover a structure that was not noticed in photographs with less sensitive instruments, thus he discovered a disk of gas tilted from our main disk and because of our vantage point it looks like a cat's tail
Artist's impression showing the planet within the disc of Beta Pictoris. Illustration: Southern European Observatory, L. Calchada

Gaseous planets form rapidly

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