"Where the JWST really excels is that we're able to physically resolve the thermal glow from dust in those inner regions. None of those instruments were able to see the interior structure within the outer belt, however. "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," Gáspár added.įomalhaut's outermost belt, which is twice as large as the Kuiper Belt, has been imaged previously by the Hubble Space Telescope, the Herschel Space Observatory and the ground-based Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA). "I would describe Fomalhaut as the archetype of debris disks found elsewhere in our galaxy, because it has components similar to those we have in our own planetary system," András Gáspár of the University of Arizona, the lead author of a study announcing the new results, said in a statement. Debris disks form later, after planets are in place. The dust belts around the young star are thought to be debris from collisions between larger bodies like asteroids and comets, and are therefore referred to as "debris disks." These disks are different than protoplanetary disks, which hold material that later gloms together to form planets.
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