JAKARTA – Armed with data from the James Webb Space Telescope, astronomers have managed to track the first visible asteroid belt outside the Solar System and uncover hidden planets.
This asteroid belt was found around the star Fomalhaut, only 25 light years away. For years, astronomers have studied the Fomalhaut debris disk, a collection of broken pieces of rock, ice and dust from all the collisions that occurred when planets were created.
But to their surprise, the dusty structure is far more complex than the asteroids and Kuiper dust belt in the Solar System. Altogether, there are three nested belts that extend 14 billion miles from the star, that’s 150 times Earth’s distance from the Sun.
The outer belt is roughly twice the scale of the Solar System’s Kuiper belt, which is made up of small bodies and cold dust beyond Neptune. The inner belt, which had never been seen before, was revealed by the Webb Telescope for the first time.
The belt surrounds the young hot star, which is visible to the naked eye as the brightest star in the southern constellation Piscis Austrinus. The dust belt is debris from colliding larger bodies, analogous to asteroids and comets, and is often described as a disk of debris.
“I would 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 of the University of Arizona in Tucson and lead author of the new paper, as quoted from the JPL NASA page, Tuesday, May 9.
“By looking at the patterns in these rings, we can actually start to make small sketches of what a planetary system should look like – if we can actually take pictures deep enough to see the suspected planets.”
The Hubble Space Telescope and Herschel Space Observatory, as well as the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), have previously taken sharp images of the outer belt.
But none of them found any structure in it. With the Webb Telescope, the inner belt was discovered thanks to infrared light.
Meanwhile, the Hubble Telescope, ALMA and the Webb Telescope teamed up to collect holistic views of the disk of debris around stars.
“With Hubble and ALMA, we can image a set of analogues to the Kuiper Belt, and we have learned a lot about how the outer disk forms and evolves,” said another team member at the University of Arizona, Schuyler Wolff.
“But we need Webb to allow us to image a dozen asteroid belts elsewhere. We can learn as much about the warm regions of this disk as Hubble and ALMA teach us about the colder outer regions.”
Most likely, this belt was sculpted by the gravitational forces generated by an invisible planet. Similarly, within the Solar System, Jupiter orbits the asteroid belt, the Kuiper Belt’s inner edge is sculpted by Neptune, and its outer edge can be shepherded by objects yet to be seen outside it.
As the Webb Telescope depicts more systems, their planetary configurations can be studied at a later date. The Fomalhaut dust ring was discovered in 1983 during observations by NASA’s Infrared Astronomical Satellite (IRAS).
The ring’s existence has also been inferred from previous observations at longer wavelengths using the submillimeter telescope on Mauna Kea, Hawaii, NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope, and the Caltech Submillimeter Observatory.
“We really didn’t expect a more complex structure with a second intermediate belt and then the wider asteroid belt. “That structure is really interesting because every time an astronomer looks at fissures and rings in the disk, they say, maybe there’s an embedded planet that forms those rings!” Wolff explained.
Furthermore, the Webb Telescope also imaged what Gáspár called a large dust cloud, possibly providing evidence of a collision that occurred in the outer ring between the two protoplanetary bodies. It is a distinct feature from the planet first seen inside the outer ring by Hubble in 2008.
Subsequent Hubble Telescope observations showed in 2014 the object had disappeared. A reasonable interpretation is that this newly discovered feature is, like the previous one, an expanding cloud of very fine dust particles from two colliding icy bodies.
The idea of a protoplanetary disk around a star goes back to the late 1700s, when astronomers Immanuel Kant and Pierre-Simon Laplace independently developed the theory that the Sun and planets formed from a rotating cloud of gas that collapsed and flattened under gravity.
The debris disk developed later, following the formation of the planets and the dispersal of primordial gases in the system. They showed that small asteroid-like objects collided violently and shattered their surfaces into massive clouds of dust and other debris.
Their dust observations provide unique clues about the structure of exoplanet systems, spanning Earth-sized planets and even asteroids, which are too small to see individually. The results of this research have been published in the journal Nature Astronomy.
Tag: planet tata surya telescope james webb nasa
2023-05-09 17:11:00
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