The James Webb Space Telescope has captured the first image of an asteroid belt outside the solar system around the young star Fomalhaut. A total of three nested belts were found that extend out to 23 billion kilometers from the star, with the outermost belt being roughly twice the scale of our Solar System’s Kuiper Belt.
Fomalhaut is the brightest star in the southern constellation Piscis Austrinus and the three dusty belts are believed to be debris from collisions of larger bodies. They were shaped by the gravitational forces produced by unseen planets, just like how Jupiter corrals the asteroid belt, while the inner edge of the Kuiper Belt is modeled by Neptune and the outer edges by yet to be discovered celestial objects.
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The belts around Fomalhaut are kind of a mystery novel: Where are the planets? I think it’s not a very big leap to say there’s probably a really interesting planetary system around the star. We definitely didn’t expect the more complex structure with the second intermediate belt and then the broader asteroid belt,” said George Rieke, US science lead for Webb’s Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI).
