2023-05-12 23:06:00
The brightest α star in southern Pisces, Fomalhaut, can be seen with the naked eye.
A young star regarding 25 light-years from Earth forms a dust ring with rock and ice chunks gathered on the outside, like the ‘Kuiper Belt’ that the Sun has beyond Neptune. The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) It was newly confirmed that two more such rings exist inside through the .
According to NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center and foreign media, a research team led by Dr. Andras Gaspar, an assistant professor of astronomy at the University of Arizona, observed warm dust around Fomalhaut with the Webb Telescope’s ‘mid-infrared instrument’ (MIRI). was published in Nature Astronomy.
| ▲ A dust ring around Fomalhaut captured by the mid-infrared ray of the Webb Telescope. |
Fomalhaut is 16 times brighter than the Sun and has nearly twice the mass. Formed regarding 440 million years ago, it is only one-tenth the age of the sun, but stellar evolution is estimated to have already progressed by half.
Fomalhaut’s dust ring was first discovered in 1983 by NASA’s Infrared Astronomical Satellite (IRAS).
In the protoplanetary disk formed around the star, planets were formed, and remnants of planetesimals left behind became asteroids or comets to form the outer ring, which is regarding twice as large as the Kuiper belt in the solar system.
Space telescopes Hubble and Herschel, and the world’s largest radio telescope, the Atacama Large Millimeter/Submillimeter Array (ALMA), have clearly captured this ring, but have not been able to find the inner ring.
The research team found a new middle ring and a wider asteroid belt inside the outer ring, suggesting that three were formed between 23 billion km, which is 150 times the distance from the sun to the earth.
At the same time, the planet was not directly observed, but it was estimated that the gravity of the unidentified planet acted in forming these rings.
In the case of the solar system, Neptune is in the Kuiper belt, and Jupiter’s gravity is acting in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.
Through the Webb Telescope, the research team also detected a new ‘great dust cloud’ that might be evidence of a collision between protoplanetary bodies in the outermost ring. It was estimated that this cloud was captured as the fine particles created by the collision of two icy bodies collided.
“Fomalhaut has a ring similar to that of the solar system, which is typical of planetary debris rings found in the Milky Way,” said Dr. Gaspard. ring), and within this, repeated collisions continue to break into small particles.”
“With Hubble and ALMA, we have captured many outer rings such as the Kuiper Belt to learn how they form and evolve, but we need the Webb telescope to find the inner asteroid belt,” said study co-author Dr. Skyler Wolf from the same university. “Just as Hubble and ALMA have taught us regarding the cooler outer ring, we might learn regarding the inner ring in the warmer region.”
Science Team [email protected]
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