The James Webb telescope photographed the first asteroid belt outside our system!

Using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST or Webb), astronomers took a close-up view of the first asteroid belt surrounding a young, hot star called Fomalhaut, which was discovered beyond our Solar System and located about 25 light-years from Earth. These dusty belts surround Fomalhaut, visible at night as the brightest star in the southern constellation Piscis Austrinus.

Important discovery from Webb

The ring structure surrounding Fomalhaut was discovered in 1983 by NASA’s Infrared Astronomical Satellite (IRAS). Since then, astronomers have attempted to study this ring system using a variety of ground- and space-based telescopes, including the Hubble and Spitzer Space Telescope and the Mauna Kea observatory in Hawaii. These facilities were able to obtain sharp images of the outermost ring, but examining the complex inner rings has been difficult, at least with current tools.

Using its infrared vision capabilities, Webb revealed the structure of the two inner belts in unprecedented detail for the first time. “What Webb really excels at is that it can physically display the thermal radiation from dust in these interior regions. So we can see inner belts that we’ve never seen before,” said Schuyler Wolff, one of the study’s authors.

Much more complex than thought

According to NASA, these dusty structures are much more complex than our Solar system’s main asteroid belt (between Jupiter and Mars) and the Kuiper belts (rocks and dust beyond Neptune). Meanwhile, the outermost belt of the observed belt is twice the size of the Kuiper Belt in our Solar System. “By looking at the patterns in these rings, we can begin to form a small sketch of what a planetary system should look like,” said Andras Gaspar, of the University of Arizona and the paper’s lead author.

Although astronomers have noticed a mysterious gap between Fomalhaut’s outer and inner rings, they view the belts surrounding the young star as an incomplete puzzle, as no planets have been discovered in the system. This new void may indicate the existence of an unknown ice giant planet like Neptune or Uranus. Webb’s observations also detected a large, dense cloud of dust in the outer ring that indicates a collision of two possible minor planets. The team hopes to use JWST in the future to study and image disks of debris around other stars. According to the research team, there may be three or more planets the size of Uranus and Neptune orbiting the hidden corners of these debris belts around the star Fomalhaut.