WASHINGTON: There has been plenty of excitement in recent decades about planets detected orbiting various stars beyond our solar system. But planets provide an incomplete picture of the complex framework that exists around stars, leaving out components like the belts of rocky and icy debris orbiting our sun.
Scientists on Monday unveiled observations by the James Webb Space Telescope showing new details about such features around a luminous star called Fomalhaut in our own neighbourhood of the Milky Way galaxy. These observations of three concentric dusty rings of debris orbiting Fomalhaut provide the fullest view to date of such structures outside our solar system.
These three belts appear to be populated by objects called planetesimals, some of which are thought to join together early in a star system's history to form planets while others remain as debris like asteroids and comets. The three nested belts extend out to 23 billion km from Fomalhaut, about 150 times the distance of Earth to the sun.
"The secondary gap we see in the system is a strong indication for the presence of an ice giant in the system," Gaspar said.
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