![]() "That structure is very exciting, because any time an astronomer sees a gap and rings in a disk, they say, 'There could be an embedded planet shaping the rings!'" "We definitely didn't expect the more complex structure with the second intermediate belt and then the broader asteroid belt," said Schuyler Wolff, another member of the team at the University of Arizona, in a media statement. Gáspár told Salon that this star system is "really chaotic" with a lot of "dynamical activity going on." Astronomers believe that the debris disks outside the Fomalhaut star system are likely shaped by unseen planets, too. Yet our own asteroid belt is influenced by planets, including as the slew of asteroids that orbit in Jupiter's shadow, which are known as trojans. That process of planetary formation, in which debris slowly accumulates enough to accure and then clear its orbital lane, is believed to be what took place during the formation of all other planets in our solar system. But none has enough gravity to coagulate into a larger planet. Indeed, our own solar system's asteroid belt is considered to be a "failed planet" of sorts there are multiple small spherical bodies that make up the asteroid belt, including Ceres, Vesta, and Pallas. Loeb said the situation in space is similar to noticing waves "on the surface of a muddy pond" on Earth, which would indicate the existence of fish "hidden from view under the water." ![]() "The dust particles in the belts are most likely shepherded gravitationally by embedded planets that had not been seen as of yet." " for the first time three nested belts in the dusty debris disk around a young hot star beyond the scale of our own planetary system," Loeb said. Harvard astronomer Avi Loeb, who was not involved in the study, called the observation "exciting." ![]() "We originally assumed that we would see a very narrow asteroid belt." Thanks to JWST, astronomers are now able to see the inner belts for the first time, revealing a slew of surprises. Previously, the Hubble Space Telescope and Herschel Space Observatory, as well as the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), have taken detailed images of the outermost asteroid belt in the Fomalhaut star system. The observations were officially published in a report on May 8 in Nature Astronomy. Indeed, while astronomers expected to see a lot of similar intricate details between our solar system and the Fomalhaut star system, they were surprised to find that it is more complicated than previously thought, in part because they discovered it has an unexpectedly convoluted asteroid belt. Thanks to new observations made using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), we have a good sense of the nature of the solar system around the star Fomelhaut, which appears as one of the brightest stars in the Southern Hemisphere night sky and which sits some 25 light years away from Earth. That makes the discovery of an astroid belt orbiting the star Fomelhaut all the more exciting. Smaller bodies are much harder to see - and when it comes to bodies smaller than planets, like moons or asteroids, there are candidate bodies though none that are actually confirmed. Because of a selection bias that favors large bodies that are close to their parent stars, many of these planets are larger than Jupiter. It wasn't until 1992 that astronomers imaged an exoplanet, meaning a planet in another solar system prior to that, some astronomers thought our solar system may be unique, and thought planets were perhaps rare.īy the 2010s, however, exoplanet discoveries were so frequent as to become quotidian now, there are over 9,000 likely or confirmed exoplanets, according to NASA. Stars can be seen with the naked eye, but planets orbiting other stars are incredibly difficult to see, even with the most powerful telescopes ever made. ![]()
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