2023-05-09 13:25:00
(CNN) — Astronomers used the James Webb Space Telescope to observe the first asteroid belt seen outside our solar system, and revealed some cosmic surprises along the way.
The space observatory focused on the hot dust surrounding Fomalhaut, a bright young star located 25 light-years from Earth in the constellation Piscis Austrinus.
The dusty disk surrounding Fomalhaut was first discovered in 1983 using NASA’s Infrared Astronomy Satellite. But the Webb researchers did not expect to see three nested dust rings stretching 23 billion kilometers from the star, or 150 times the distance from Earth to the Sun.
Webb’s new view revealed for the first time Fomalhaut’s two inner belts, which did not appear in previous images taken by the Hubble Space Telescope or other observatories.
The detailed image of the dust belts, captured in infrared light invisible to the human eye, showed that the structures are more complex than the main asteroid belt and the Kuiper belt of our solar system.
The main asteroid belt, located between Mars and Jupiter, is where the debris from the formation of our solar system orbits the Sun. In the Kuiper belt, located in the outer reaches of our solar system, there is more icy debris: a ring donut-shaped image of small celestial bodies and dust beyond Neptune.
The revelation of Fomalhaut’s two inner rings suggests that planets lurking deep in the star system may be affecting the shape of the dust belt. The outer Fomalhaut belt alone is twice the size of the Kuiper belt. The new image and a study detailing the findings were published Monday in the journal Nature Astronomy.
Gravitational forces shape rings
The huge Fomalhaut dust belts were probably created from debris left over from the collision of larger bodies, such as asteroids and comets.
Then, the gravitational influence of what researchers believe to be unseen planets orbiting the star shaped the dust belts, just as Jupiter and Neptune shape our asteroid belt and the inner edge of the asteroid belt. Kuiper.
“I would describe Fomalhaut as the archetypal debris disk found elsewhere in our galaxy, because it has similar components to what we have in our own planetary system,” said study lead author András Gáspár, a research assistant professor of astronomy. at the University of Arizona in Tucson, in a statement.
“By looking at the patterns in these rings, we can start to make a little sketch of what a planetary system might look like, if we could actually take an image deep enough to see the putative planets.”
An annotated image of the Fomalhaut system reveals different structures in the three dust belts around the star. (Credit: NASA/ESA/CSA/A. Pagan/A. Gáspár)
Combining Webb’s new observation with images previously taken by Hubble, the European Space Agency’s Herschel Space Observatory and the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array may provide scientists with a more detailed look at how rocks form. debris belts around stars.
Webb also observed a feature that Gáspár calls “the great cloud of dust”, in which two celestial bodies could have collided in the outer ring. The cloud is separate from another that Hubble detected in 2008 and that could have been a planet, but later observations showed that the object disappeared in 2014, implying another collision that left only dust in its wake.
Stars form from gas and dust, and then a ring of leftover material called a protoplanetary disk orbits the star, where planets are born. The idea for the disk came from the astronomers Immanuel Kant and Pierre-Simon Laplace in the late 18th century. Once planets form around a star, debris belts form that are shaped by the planets’ gravity. Inside the belts, objects like asteroids collide with each other and create more debris and dust.
The study of dust belts can help reveal more secrets about the formation of planetary systems.
“The belts around Fomalhaut are something of a mystery novel: where are the planets?” George Rieke, study co-author, professor of astronomy and planetary sciences at the University of Arizona in Tucson and head of the team, said in a statement. scientist from the Webb mid-infrared instrument used in the observations. “I think it’s not a very big leap to say that there’s probably a really interesting planetary system around the star.”
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