NASA astronomers have captured a debris disk around Fomalhaut, a young star, in an attempt to study the first asteroid belt outside our solar system in infrared light. However, observers discovered a much more complicated structure, three belts of dust extending to 14 billion miles from the star.
The photographs captured by the James Webb Space Telescope display an orange-toned glowing band, produced from thermal heat.
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“I would describe Fomalhaut as the archetype of debris disks found elsewhere in our galaxy because it has components similar to those we have in our own planetary system,” Andras Gaspar said in a NASA press release. Gaspar is an astronomer at the University of Arizona and the lead author of a paper analyzing the results, which were published in Nature Astronomy on Monday.
The outer belt is around twice the size of the Kuiper Belt, which is a ring of icy objects, mostly frozen methane and ammonia, around the Sun. The inner belts were captured for the first time, detailing the structure of a proto-planetary disk.
“By looking at the patterns in these rings, we can actually start to make a little sketch of what a planetary system ought to look like, if we could actually take a deep enough picture to see the suspected planets,” Gaspar said.
The rings surrounding one of the brightest stars in the universe are made of debris, gas, and dust that come from the fallout of collisions of bodies like asteroids and comets.
“Where Webb really excels is that we're able to physically resolve the thermal glow from dust in those inner regions,” said Schuyler Wolff, a member of the team at Arizona. “So you can see inner belts that we could never see before.”
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The debris ring around Fomalhaut, located 25 light years away from Earth in the constellation Piscis Austrinus, will merge into planets, moons, and other bodies in a few billion years or so.
“We definitely didn't expect the more complex structure with the second intermediate belt and then the broader asteroid belt,” said Wolff. “That structure is very exciting because any time an astronomer sees a gap and rings in a disk, they say, ‘There could be an embedded planet shaping the rings!’”