Image
The Hubble telescope image shows a windowpane-shaped occulting bar -- the dark bands running
vertically through the middle of the image and horizontally across the upper part of it. The
occulting bar covers the innermost part of the disk and star, about 7.1 billion miles (11.5 billion
kilometers) or 1.4 times our solar system's diameter. The diagonal lines are the remnants of the
diffraction spikes produced in Hubble telescope images of bright stars.
The disk is extremely wide: its diameter is roughly 1,300 times Earth's distance from the Sun. The
disk material seen in this image is at a distance equivalent to well beyond Pluto's orbit.
The star's disk shows a wealth of structure, with bright spiral-shaped bands from 9 o'clock to 6 o'clock and closer to the star from 12 o'clock to 3 o'clock. The imaging spectrograph data show that these bands are themselves composed of numerous smaller bands. The smallest features include some bright knots of material to the left of the star.
Photo Credit: C.A. Grady (National Optical Astronomy Observatories, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center), B. Woodgate (NASA Goddard Space Flight Center), F. Bruhweiler and A. Boggess (Catholic University of America), P. Plait and D. Lindler (ACC, Inc., Goddard Space Flight Center), M. Clampin (Space Telescope Science Institute), and NASA.