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Science 27 September 1996:
Vol. 273. no. 5283, pp. 1799 - 1800
DOI:

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Research News

Gretchen Vogel

Greenbelt, Maryland--By analyzing light from the disk of gas and dust that swirls around the nearby star Beta Pictoris, a Hubble Space Telescope spectrograph has yielded several kinds of evidence that the disk is home to swarms of comets. Features of the disk's ultraviolet spectrum suggest that blobs of gas are falling toward the star at several hundred kilometers per second, faster than gas alone could travel, and that something is continuously supplying carbon and carbon monoxide to the inner part of the disk. The material responsible for both spectral features could be evaporating from comets.




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Science. ISSN 0036-8075 (print), 1095-9203 (online)