Astronomers used the James Webb Space Telescope to observe the first asteroid belt seen outside of our solar system and unveiled some cosmic surprises along the way.
The space observatory focused on the warm dust that encircles Fomalhaut, a young, bright star located 25 light-years from Earth in the Piscis Austrinus constellation,The dusty disk around Fomalhaut was initially discovered in 1983 using NASA's Infrared Astronomical Satellite. But the Webb researchers weren't expecting to see three nested rings of dust extending out 14 billion miles from the star - or 150 times the distance of Earth from the sun.
The detailed image of the dust belts, captured in infrared light that is invisible to the human eye, showed that the structures are more complex than the main asteroid belt and Kuiper Belt in our solar system. "I would describe Fomalhaut as the archetype of debris discs found elsewhere in our galaxy, because it has components similar to those we have in our own planetary system," said lead study author András Gáspár, assistant research professor of astronomy at the University of Arizona in Tucson, in a statement.
Combining Webb's new observation along with images taken previously by Hubble, the European Space Agency's Herschel Space Observatory and the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array of telescopes can provide scientists with a more detailed view of how belts of debris form around stars.
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