![]() It would have to be constantly regenerated from collisions between asteroids and comets, and the study team believe that they may have spotted another dust cloud from a collision that is in the process of expanding. The dust in that intermediate ring hasn't been lingering for 400 million years, the estimated age of Fomalhaut. “It fits really well with the theory that Fomalhaut b, the exoplanet candidate, is a dust cloud from a collision, because there is a bunch of stuff at this distance that Fomalhaut b would have had to come from,” Lawler says. The intermediate belt was a surprise, she adds, because previous images hadn't shown anything there. “I could spend a lot of time just staring at that image.” “It's so cool to finally see all of the structure inside the main dust belt that other telescopes have never been able to see before, so I was just really excited,” says Samantha Lawler, an astronomer at the University of Regina in Saskatchewan, Canada, who wasn’t involved in the new research. ![]() The gaps between the rings as well as their misalignment suggest that there are unseen planets orbiting the star that are too small to be observed. Using MIRI, Gáspár and his colleagues saw that the Fomalhaut system not only has an inner disk like the asteroid belt and a big dusty outer ring like the Kuiper belt, but also a fuzzy intermediate ring. It is really a once in a generation opportunity for astronomers.” “And I don't think we're going to see anything like it again in my professional career for sure. Previous space telescopes also had mid-infrared instruments, but MIRI’s aperture is much bigger, which means it can collect more light and resolve fainter objects. ![]() This type of light is especially useful for observing dust. MIRI captures mid-infrared light, which the human eye cannot see. There should be debris disks circling thousands of other stars, but observing those faraway belts of smashed up space rock is no easy feat. We see a very complex and very dynamically active system.” Space leftoversĪround the sun, the asteroid belt and more distant Kuiper belt contain the leftovers of the solar system-asteroids, comets, planetesimals, and other ancient debris that was not incorporated into the planets. “It paints a very different picture from what we assumed we would be seeing,” Gáspár says.
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