NASA snaps first image of debris ring around Fomalhaut star.

NASA Discovers Three Belts of Dust Around Young Star

NASA astronomers have made an exciting discovery while studying the first asteroid belt outside our solar system in infrared light. The James Webb Space Telescope captured photographs of a debris disk around Fomalhaut, a young star, revealing a much more complicated structure than expected. Instead of one belt of dust, there were three belts extending to 14 billion miles from the star.

Uncovering the Secrets of Fomalhaut

Andras Gaspar, an astronomer at the University of Arizona and lead author of a paper analyzing the results, described Fomalhaut as the archetype of debris disks found elsewhere in our galaxy. The outer belt is around twice the size of the Kuiper Belt, while the inner belts were captured for the first time, detailing the structure of a proto-planetary disk.

• The rings surrounding Fomalhaut are made of debris, gas, and dust from collisions of bodies like asteroids and comets.
• The debris ring will merge into planets, moons, and other bodies in a few billion years.
• The discovery of the complex structure is exciting because it could indicate an embedded planet shaping the rings.

What the Photographs Reveal

The photographs captured by the James Webb Space Telescope display an orange-toned glowing band, produced from thermal heat. Schuyler Wolff, a member of the team at Arizona, said, “Where Webb really excels is that we’re able to physically resolve the thermal glow from dust in those inner regions. So you can see inner belts that we could never see before.”

Gaspar added, “By looking at the patterns in these rings, 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.”

These findings upend previous assumptions about comets and provide valuable insights into the formation of planetary systems. To learn more about this exciting discovery, click here to read more from the Washington Examiner.

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