Astronomers have studied 500 comets orbiting the Beta Pictoris and have discovered that they belong to 2 distinct families of exocomets: old exocomets that have made multiple passages near the star, and younger exocomets that probably came from the recent breakup of 1 or more larger objects. Beta Pictoris is a young star located 63 light-years from the Sun. It is only 20 ga old and is surrounded by a huge disc of material — a very active young planetary system where gas and dust are produced by the evaporation of comets and the collisions of asteroids.

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