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“I think it’s not a very big leap to say there’s probably a really interesting planetary system around the star.September brings the first crisp, cool nights of early autumn and longer hours of darkness. “The belts around Fomalhaut are kind of a mystery novel: Where are the planets?” said study coauthor George Rieke, regents professor of astronomy and planetary sciences at the University of Arizona in Tucson and science team lead for Webb’s Mid-Infrared Instrument used in the observations, in a statement. Studying the dust belts can help unlock more of the secrets behind how planetary systems form. Inside the belts, objects like asteroids crash into one another and create more debris and dust. Once the planets form around a star, debris belts form and become shaped by the gravity of the planets. The idea of the disk originated from astronomers Immanuel Kant and Pierre-Simon Laplace in the late 18th century. Stars form from gas and dust, and then a ring of leftover material called a protoplanetary disk orbits the star, where planets are born. Webb telescope captures glowing starburst as galaxies collide Shining like a brilliant beacon amidst a sea of galaxies, Arp 220 lights up the night sky in this view from NASA's James Webb Space Telescope. Then, the dust was shaped into belts by the gravitational influence of what the researchers believe are unseen planets that orbit the star, the same way Jupiter and Neptune shape our asteroid belt and the inner edge of the Kuiper Belt.

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.