NASA’s James Webb Telescope has captured a more in-depth look at the debris surrounding Formalhaut, a hot new young star in in the constellation Piscis Austrinu (the Southern Fish). The star is 25 light-years from Earth. Formalhaut has been one of the stable anchor points by which other stars are classified since 1943. In 1983 the Hubble telescope captured debris around it, it wasn’t until now that the JWST could image two smaller rings inside the massive outer ring.
JWST observations show Fomalhaut’s ring system consists of three nested belts. They extend out around 14.3 billion miles (23 million kilometers). That’s nearly 150 times the distance between Earth and the sun. The rings are more complex than either the Kuiper Belt (Frigid bodies beyond Neptune) or the main asteroid belt, which sits between Jupiter and Mars.
“By looking at the patterns in these rings,” András Gáspár of the University of Arizona said, “we can actually start to make a little sketch of what a planetary system ought to look like- if we could actually take a deep enough picture to see the suspected planets.”
This find is extremely exciting because it means that there is quite possibly a solar system of new and developing planets. They are classifying them as “debris disks” which unlike interplanetary disks mean that planets are either forming or already in place.
We’ll let you know what else we see from the James Webb Telescope and NASA.
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