The new image and a study detailing the findings was published Monday in the journal Nature Astronomy.įomalhaut’s massive dust belts were likely created from the debris left behind as larger bodies such as asteroids and comets collided. Fomalhaut’s outer belt alone is about twice the scale of the Kuiper Belt.
The revelation of the Fomalhaut’s two inner rings has suggested that planets hidden deeper within the star system may be affecting the dust belt’s shape. More icy leftovers can be found in the Kuiper Belt on the edge of our solar system, a doughnut-shaped ring of small celestial bodies and dust beyond Neptune. The main asteroid belt, located between Mars and Jupiter, is where leftovers from the formation of our solar system orbit the sun. Webb telescope detects mysterious water vapor in a nearby star system However, they caution that while this might be a sign of a planetary atmosphere, the water could be on the star itself - specifically, in cool starspots - and not from the planet at all. By observing GJ 486 b transit in front of its star, astronomers sought signs of an atmosphere. This artist concept represents the rocky exoplanet GJ 486 b, which orbits a red dwarf star that is only 26 light-years away in the constellation Virgo. The detailed image of the dust belts, captured in infrared light that is invisible to the human eye, showed that the structures are more complex than the main asteroid belt and Kuiper Belt in our solar system. Webb’s new view revealed Fomalhaut’s two inner belts for the first time, which didn’t appear in previous images taken by the Hubble Space Telescope or other observatories. But the Webb researchers weren’t expecting to see three nested rings of dust extending out 14 billion miles (23 billion kilometers) from the star - or 150 times the distance of Earth from the sun. The dusty disk around Fomalhaut was initially discovered in 1983 using NASA’s Infrared Astronomical Satellite. The space observatory focused on the warm dust that encircles Fomalhaut, a young, bright star located 25 light-years from Earth in the Piscis Austrinus constellation.
Astronomers used the James Webb Space Telescope to observe the first asteroid belt seen outside of our solar system and unveiled some cosmic surprises along the way.
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