About 25 light years from Earth, you can find Fomalhaut, one of the brightest stars in the night sky. Astronomers have been fascinated with the Fomalhaut system for decades and finally have a better understanding of it thanks to the James Webb Space Telescope. In a study published in the on Monday, a group of scientists made up mostly of astronomers from the University of Arizona and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. They revealed that the Fomalhaut system is .
Since 1983, astronomers have known that the 440 million-year-old Fomalhaut is surrounded by dust and debris. What comes as a surprise is that there are three different debris fields around the star. The closest to Fomalhaut is similar to our solar system’s asteroid belt but far more expansive than what astronomers expected. According to , Fomalhaut’s inner asteroid belt stretches from about seven astronomical units from the star to about 80 astronomical units out. For perspective, it’s ten times broader than what astronomers thought.
NASA, ESA, CSA
The Fomalhaut system has even more intriguing features. Besides the asteroid belts, there’s a second debris belt tilted at 23 degrees from everything else in orbit of the star. “This is a truly unique aspect of the system,” András Gáspár, the lead author on the study, told . Gáspár believes that the tilted belt could be the result of undiscovered planets in orbit of Fomalhaut.
George Rieke, one of the astronomers on the team, said, “The belts around Fomalhaut are kind of a mystery novel: Where are the planets?” He added, “I think it’s not a very big leap to say there’s probably a really interesting planetary system around the star.”
Further out from Fomalhaut, there’s an outer debris ring similar to our solar system’s Kuiper belt. The ring includes a feature that the team named the Great Dust Cloud. It’s unclear if this feature is part of the Fomalhaut system or something shining beyond it. The astronomers suspect that it was formed when two space rocks more than 400 miles wide collided with each other. According to Gáspár and his colleagues, there may be three or more Uranus and Neptune-sized exoplanets orbiting Fomalhaut. They’re currently reviewing the JWST images to confirm the existence of those planetoids.
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