“James Webb Space Telescope Finds Three Belts of Debris Around Fomalhaut Star”

SPACE — Astronomers have uncovered three belts of debris around a young star named Fomalhaut. This feature was seen using the James Webb Space Telescope.

The three nested belts extend 23 billion kilometers from the star. As an illustration, that distance is 150 times the distance from Earth to the Sun.

Fomalhaut can be seen with the naked eye as the brightest star in the southern constellation Piscis Austrinus. This star is sometimes called the autumn star. There are also those who call it a lonely star.

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Fomalhaut is the 18th brightest star in the sky. In 2003, the American Space Agency’s Spitzer Telescope (NASA) obtained the first infrared image of a dust disk surrounding Fomalhaut.

The dusty belt that surrounds it, is often described as a “disk of debris”. These disks of debris consist of debris left behind by colliding bodies such as asteroids and comets.

The belt or disk is much like our solar system’s asteroid belt and the Kuiper belt, home to comets and larger bodies such as the dwarf planet Pluto.

“I describe Fomalhaut as an archetype of a disk of debris found elsewhere in our galaxy because it has components similar to those we have in our own planetary system,” said András Gáspár, lead author of the paper describing the results. ABC.net.au.

Other telescopes have previously taken sharp images of the outer belt. However, none of the instruments were able to locate the belt’s interior structure. The Fomalhaut dust ring was first discovered in 1983 by NASA’s Infrared Astronomical Satellite (IRAS).

Now, the Webb telescope, which was launched in 2021, is able to reveal the inner belt due to the use of infrared light.

“Webb really excelled. We were able to physically resolve the hot glow of the dust in that inner region. So you can see the inner belt in a way we’ve never seen before,” said Schuyler Wolff, another team member at the University of Arizona.

Scientists consider the belt around Fomalhaut a kind of mystery novel. Scientists wonder, if there is a belt then where is the planet? For scientists, the structure of the belts is of great interest because whenever an astronomer looks at fissures and rings in the disk, scientists speculate that there may be embedded planets that make up the rings.