New observations by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) reveal that the first asteroid belt discovered outside the solar system is more complex than previously thought.
Use astronomers JWST To check dusty ring system around whale moutha young and hot star located about 25 light years from Earth and visible to the naked eye in the constellation Piscis Austrinu, Southern Fish.
The Fomalhaut ring system consists of three intertwined belts that span about 14.3 billion miles (23 million kilometers) — about 150 times the distance between Earth and the sun. Episodes are the more complicated of the two Kuiper beltthe ring of icy bodies beyond Neptune, or the main asteroid belt, that lies between Jupiter and Mars, new JWST observations show.
Related: 12 amazing discoveries made by the James Webb Space Telescope
Astronomers discovered the dusty structure surrounding Fomalhaut in 1983 using NASA’s Infrared Astronomy Satellite. However, the two inner belts of this system had never been seen prior to these observations with JWST.
The dust belt around young stars is considered debris from collisions between larger bodies such as asteroids and comets, and is therefore referred to as a “debris disk”. This disc is different from Disk protoplanet, which stored matter that later clumped together to form planets. The debris disk formed later, after the planets were in place.
“I would describe Fomalhaut as the archetype for disk debris found elsewhere in our galaxy, as it contains components similar to those found in our planetary system,” András Gáspár of the University of Arizona, lead author of the study announcing the new findings. the, he said in a statement (Opens in a new tab).
“Seeing the patterns in these rings, we can actually begin to draw a small outline of what a planetary system should look like – if we can actually take an image deep enough to see the suspected planet,” added Gaspard.
The outer Fomalhaut belt, twice the size of the Kuiper belt, was previously imaged by Hubble Space Telescope, Herschel Space Observatory and the Atacama Large Millimeter/Sub-Terrestrial Array (ALMA). However, neither of these instruments can see the internal structure inside the outer corset.
“Where JWST really excels is we can physically deal with the thermal light from the dust in those inner regions. So you get to see the inner belt like we’ve never seen before,” study team member Schuyler Wolf, also of Arizona State University, said in the same statement.
Going forward, astronomers hope to image disks of Fomalhaut-like debris around other stars with JWST.
with Hubble and Alma“We were able to image the Kuiper belt analogue circuit, and we learned a lot about how the outer disc forms and evolves,” continues Wolfe. But we need JWST to allow us to image a dozen asteroid belts elsewhere. We can learn as much about the warm inner region of this disk as Hubble and ALMA have taught us about the colder outer region. “
Just as Jupiter dominates the main asteroid belt When Neptune carved into the Kuiper belt, astronomers thought that the outer solar system’s disk of debris might have been formed by invisible planets. This means that there may be a planet or two lurking in the rings around Fomalhaut.
“We certainly didn’t expect a more complex structure with a second intermediate belt and then a wider asteroid belt,” said Wolf. “This structure is very interesting, because whenever an astronomer looks at fissures and rings in the disk, they say, ‘There may be embedded planets that make up those rings!’”
Features detected by JWST in the rings may indicate the formation of protoplanets. The team saw what Gaspar called a “huge dust cloud”, which may indicate a collision in the outer ring of Fomalhaut between smaller planets “under construction”. Thus, this feature could be an expanding cloud of very fine dust particles from two icy bodies colliding with each other.
Hubble spotted a similar feature in the same rings in 2008. It disappeared when the space telescope reexamined the ring system in 2014, the researchers said.
Deeper investigation into more systems like Fomalhaut with JWST could reveal how planets move through this flat disk. Meanwhile, observing these same dust clouds can reveal details about the structure of planetary systems other than our own. This includes discovering the shapes of asteroids – which are much smaller than seen even with powerful instruments like JWST or Hubble – and whether they are similar to the space rocks orbiting our star and its planets.
The team’s research was published online Monday (8/5) in the journal natural astronomy (Opens in a new tab).
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2023-05-08 20:48:25
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