8/6/2023 0 Comments Telescope drawing![]() The results were published on May 8 in the journal Nature Astronomy. The inner belts in the Fomalhaut system – which had never been seen before – were revealed by Webb for the first time. The scale of the outermost belt is roughly twice the scale of our solar system’s Kuiper belt, which consists of small bodies and cold dust beyond Neptune, the outermost known planet. There are three nested belts extending out to 14 billion miles, or 23 billion kilometers, from the star that’s 150 times the distance of Earth from the sun. To the astronomers’ surprise, the dusty structures are much more complex than the asteroid and Kuiper dust belts of our solar system. These belts most likely are carved by the gravitational forces produced by embedded, unseen planets. The image shows nested concentric rings of dust, some of which had never been seen before. Credit: Adam Block and András Gáspár/Steward ObservatoryĪ new Webb Space Telescope image of the bright, nearby star Fomalhaut reveals details never seen before, including nested rings of dust that hint at the forces of unseen planets.Ī team led by University of Arizona astronomers used NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope to image the warm dust around a nearby young star, Fomalhaut, to study the first asteroid belt ever seen outside of our solar system in infrared light. This dust is organized into a second ring, indicating the presence of one or more planets nearby. ![]() JWST’s MIRI instrument provides the full picture by revealing warm dust filling the inner part of the Fomalhaut system (orange). The resulting finer-grained particles, traced by the Hubble Space Telescope and shown here in blue, are blown out of the outer ring by the photons streaming from the star. Observations made with the Atacama Large Millimeter/Submillimeter Array reveal sand-sized grains orbiting the star, chipping away at each other (shown in red). This image shows how the components of the Fomalhaut debris system relate to each other.
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