A 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. A team led by University of Arizona astronomers used NASA's James Webb Space Telescope to image the warm dust around a
This image shows how the components of the Fomalhaut debris system relate to each other. Observations made with the Atacama Large Millimeter/Submillimeter Array reveal sand-sized grains orbiting the star, chipping away at each other . 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.
This image shows the Fomalhaut system’s features, including the inner and outer asteroid belts. The “great dust cloud” is highlighted, and pullouts show it in two infrared wavelengths, 23 and 25.5 microns. The scale bar is labeled in astronomical units, which is the average distance between Earth and the sun, or 93 million miles. The outer ring spans about 240 Earth-sun distances.
“Where Webb really excels is that we’re able to physically resolve the thermal glow from dust in those inner regions,” said Schuyler Wolff, an assistant research professor at Steward and a co-author on the paper. “So, you can see inner belts that we could never see before.” These belts most likely are carved by the gravitational forces produced by unseen planets. Similarly, inside our solar system,corrals the asteroid belt; the inner edge of the Kuiper belt is sculpted by Neptune, and the outer edge could be shepherded by yet-unseen bodies beyond it. As Webb images more systems, astronomers will gain a more detailed understanding of the configurations of their planets.
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