The asteroid belt, the first discovered outside our solar system, is more complex than expected, new observations from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) reveal.
Astronomers used JWST to probe the dusty ring system around Fomalhaut, a young, hot star about 25 light-years from Earth.
Fomalhaut’s ring system consists of three nested belts that stretch for approximately 14.3 billion miles (23 million kilometers). This is about 150 times the distance between the Earth and the Sun. New JWST observations show that the ring is more complex than the Kuiper belt, the ring of frigid bodies beyond Neptune, or the major asteroid belt located between Jupiter and Mars.
Astronomers used NASA’s infrared astronomical satellites to discover the dusty structure surrounding Fomalhaut in 1983. However, his two inner bands of this system had never been sighted prior to this observation by JWST.
Dust belts around young stars are called ‘debris disks’ because they are thought to be debris from collisions with large bodies such as asteroids and comets. These disks are different from protoplanetary disks, which hold material that later comes together to form planets. A debris disk forms after a planet is positioned.
“Fomalhaut is a prototypical fragmentary disk found elsewhere in our galaxy because it has a composition similar to that found in our own planetary system,” said Andras Gaspard of the University of Arizona. Because of the new results, András Gaspard of the University of Arizona said in a statement.
“By looking at the patterns of these rings, we can actually start making little sketches of what the planetary system should look like. If you can take a picture
Fomalhaut’s outermost belt is twice as large as the Kuiper Belt and has been previously imaged by the Hubble Space Telescope, the Herschel Space Observatory, and the Atacama Large Millimeter/Submillimeter Wave Array (ALMA) on the ground. However, none of these instruments were able to see the internal structure within the outer belt.
“What the JWST is really good at is being able to physically resolve the thermal glow from the dust in those inner regions, so you can see inner belts that you couldn’t see before,” said Arizona. said in the same statement.
In the future, astronomers hope to use the JWST to image fragmentary disks like Fomalhaut around other stars.
“Using Hubble and ALMA, we were able to photograph the Kuiper Belt analogue, and we learned a lot about how the outer disk forms and evolves,” Wolff said. continue. “But to image a dozen or so asteroid belts elsewhere, we need the JWST. For the warm regions inside these disks, Hubble and ALMA tell us about the colder outer regions. You can learn as much as you did.”
Just as Jupiter dominates the major asteroid belts and Neptune forms the Kuiper belt, astronomers believe that extrasolar debris disks may be shaped by invisible planets. , there may be one or two planets lurking in the rings around Fomalhaut.
“We never expected the more complex structure of a second intermediate belt and a wider asteroid belt,” Wolff said. “The structure is very interesting because every time an astronomer finds a gap or a ring in the disk, they say, ‘There could be a ring-forming planet embedded in it!'”
One of the ring features already discovered by JWST may indicate the presence of a forming protoplanet. The team saw what Gaspard dubbed “a giant dust cloud.” This could indicate a collision between her two “under construction” infant planets at Fomalhaut’s outer ring. Therefore, this feature could be an expanding cloud of very fine dust particles from her two ice bodies that collided with each other.
By the time the Hubble Space Telescope resurveyed the ring system in 2014, similar features were discovered in the same rings.
A deeper investigation of many systems like Fomalhaut using JWST may reveal how planets move through these pancake flat disks. On the other hand, observing the dust cloud itself could reveal details about the structure of planetary systems other than our own. This includes what asteroids are like, too small to be seen by even powerful instruments like JWST or Hubble, and what they are like as rocks in space swirling around our star and its planets. It involves discovering whether it resembles
The team’s research was published online in the journal Nature Astronomy on Monday (8 May).
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