Scientists believe Fomalhaut’s ‘new’ dust belt could be driven by an invisible planet.
An American team of astronomers has discovered aanother belt of dust and a huge cloud of debris around one of the brightest stars and closest, in astronomical terms, to the Earth. The discovery is described in a study published Monday in the journal Nature Astronomy. Using high-resolution images taken by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, researchers have discovered new features of the 440-million-year-old “young” star Fomalhaut, positioned 25 light-years from our planet.
It was already known that Fomalhaut’s star was surrounded by an inner and outer ring similar to our solar system’s Kuiper belt (a ring of icy bodies beyond Neptune). However, new images have revealed that there is also umid-range, which probably comesled by an invisible planet“. Meanwhile, a large cloud of debris was detected inside the outer ring, which would have originated following a collision between two protoplanetary bodies. Dust belts are formed by debris from collisions of larger bodies, such as asteroids and comets. “It is very likely that the three belts are sculpted by gravitational forces produced by embedded and hidden planets“, said the authors of the study, who believe that Fomalhaut would host a complex and dynamically active planetary system.