NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope takes incredible photos of a star 25 light-years away – and it’s like Nothing seen before

NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope takes incredible photos of a star 25 light-years away – and it’s like NOTHING seen beforeStunning new images from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) show the solar system in more detail than ever before.

Fomalhaut is a star located about 25 light-years from Earth and surrounded by an impressive dust belt that stretches 14 billion kilometers.Scientists have found, thanks to new data from a $10 billion telescope, that the star is also surrounded by the two inner belts as well as a “large dust cloud”.

Scientists previously thought they had found a planet around Fomalhaut, although it was later believed to be the remnant of a cosmic collision.However, the discovery of these new belts around Fomalhaut may be the strongest clue that there are planets there, possibly with extraterrestrial life.

A study describing the findings, led by András Gáspár at the University of Arizona, has been published today in Nature Astronomy.

‘Fomalhaut appears to be the site of a complex and possibly dynamically active planetary system,’ they say. The 440-million-year-old star has a mass around 1.92 times that of our sun and is located in the constellation of Piscis Austrinus, approximately 25 light years away.

Fomalhaut is one of the brightest stars in the night’s sky – 15 times as bright as our sun – and it is blazing through hydrogen at such a furious rate that it will burn out in just one billion years.

We now know that there are three belts around Fomalhaut: two previously unknown inner belts and one previously known outer belt.The most distant star is 14 billion miles (23 billion kilometers) from the star, about 150 times the distance from Earth to the Sun.

The three Fomalhaut belts combine to form a distinct “debris disk” surrounding a collection of cosmic dust, pebbles, and other remnants of past rock collisions.In their study, the experts analyzed images of the debris system around Fomalhaut using JWST’s Mid-InfraRed Instrument (MIRI), which sees light in the mid-infrared region of the electromagnetic spectrum.

The images show the previously known outer ring in finer detail, which is considered ‘analogous’ or similar to our own solar system’s Kuiper belt.

This doughnut-shaped ring of icy objects extends just beyond the orbit of Neptune and a ‘region of leftovers from the solar system’s early history’ NASA says.

But Fomalhaut’s two newly discovered inner belts were also revealed by Webb in infrared light for the first time.

This is exciting for astronomers because it hints at the possibility that Fomalhaut is analogous to our solar system, and that it may have planets like ours.

‘The belts around Fomalhaut are kind of a mystery novel – where are the planets?’ said study author George Rieke, US science lead for Webb’s MIRI instrument.

‘I think it’s not a very big leap to say there’s probably a really interesting planetary system around the star.’

The ‘narrow’ belt in the middle may be shepherded by the gravitational influence of unseen planets, suggesting the presence of a world in the gap between belts.

The newly discovered intermediate belt is also ‘misaligned’ compared with the outer belt and may have been the origin of a previously known dust cloud generated by a collision.

The images also reveal a large dust cloud within the outer ring, which the authors name the ‘Great Dust Cloud’.

The large dust cloud could be evidence of an ongoing collision in the outer ring between two ‘protoplanets’ – large orbiting bodies of matter thought to be evolving into a planet.

So there are either planets that evolved around Fomalhaut or others that have existed for millions of years.

However, according toexperts, Fomalhaut and our own system share important similarities.”I would describe Fomalhaut as the archetypal debris disk found elsewhere in our galaxy because it has similar components to those we have in our planetary system,” said Gáspár.

“By looking at the patterns of these rings, we can actually start making a little sketch of what a planetary system would look like – if we could actually take a picture deep enough to see the suspect planets.”‘Gáspár said Webb was finally able to discover the planets around Fomalhaut using NIRCam, another of his instruments.

TheNIRCam captures light from the edge of the visible to the near-infrared portion of the electromagnetic spectrum.“We also have the NIRCam data… they will be released soon. That’s all I’ll say,” he told MailOnline.Since its launch from Earth on Christmas Day 2021,JWST has been a major success and a major milestone in the development of astronomical knowledge.released its first images in July 2022, including a dying, dust-covered star and a “cosmic dance” among a galaxy cluster.

Other stunning images released last year include The Pillars of Creation, the Rings of Neptune, the Wagonwheel Galaxy and the stellar nursery known as the Tarantula Nebula.