Webb Space Telescope Spots Surprise Asteroid Belts Around Nearby Star

pcmag.com:

With a little help from the James Webb Space Telescope, astronomers discovered two never-before-seen asteroid belts encircling nearby star Fomalhaut.

Scientists using the joint NASA/ESA/CSA device to image dusty debris discs around Fomalhaut—already famous for being one of the brightest stars in the night sky—were surprised to find(Opens in a new window) the structures are more complex than anything found in our solar system.

Three nested belts extend some 23 billion kilometers from the main star, or about 150 times the distance of Earth from the Sun. The outermost band—previously captured by the Hubble Space Telescope, Herschel Space Observatory, and Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA)—is roughly twice the scale of the Kuiper Belt, a circumstellar disk of small bodies and cold dust beyond Neptune.

The inner belts, also known as debris discs, meanwhile, were revealed for the first time(Opens in a new window) by Webb.

"With Hubble and ALMA, we were able to image a bunch of Kuiper Belt analogues, and we've learned loads about how outer discs form and evolve," according to Schuyler Wolff, a member of the University of Arizona team working on this project. "But we need Webb to allow us to image a dozen or so asteroid belts elsewhere.

"We can learn just as much about the inner warm regions of these discs as Hubble and ALMA taught us about the colder outer regions," he continued. "Where Webb really excels is that we're able to physically resolve the thermal glow from dust in those inner regions. So you can see inner belts that we could never see before."

Fomalhaut's most distant dust ring was discovered in 1983, through observations made by NASA's Infrared Astronomical Satellite (IRAS). The existence of the ring has also