Distinguish one-component and two-component dust distributions

Determine whether the β Pictoris hot exozodiacal emission consists solely of a compact inner component or also includes a more extended component near 1 au.

Background

The visibility data are consistent with a compact hot-dust component near the sublimation radius and may also support an additional, fainter component near 1 au. However, the model comparison does not establish whether the extended component is required, because one-component and two-component models provide indistinguishable descriptions of the observations.

References

We also note that the data cannot distinguish between the one-component and two-component models with a more extended emission at ~ 1 au, which emits approximately four times less flux than the inner component.

— VLTI/MATISSE observations of the hot dust around $β$ Pictoris: Observing faint objects with MATISSE  (2609.29783 - Priolet et al., 24 Sep 2026) in Section 5, Conclusions