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Researchers using NASA's James Webb Space Telescope have discovered multiple debris rings within a previously discovered ring around the young star Fomalhaut. Photo Courtesy of NASA May 9 (UPI) -- Researchers using NASA's James Webb Space Telescope observed multiple debris rings surrounding a young star. The James Webb Telescope's Mid-Infrared Instrument, which is designed to capture very long wavelengths of light, found three nested belts surrounding the Fomalhaut star, out to a distance of up to 14 billion miles, NASA said Monday. Observations by NASA's Infrared Astronomical Satellite first discovered Fomalhuat's dust ring, the first asteroid belt seen outside of...

The first planet to be discovered outside our solar system isn't a planet at all, and may be a giant dust cloud created by the collision of two icy asteroids, a study finds. Twelve years ago, astronomers spotted what they thought was a Saturn-like planet in the Fomalhaut star system 25 light years from Earth, and called it Fomalhaut b. But now researchers from the University of Arizona claim the visible and infrared images of the 'planet' captured by the Hubble Space Telescope were actually of a cosmic collision. The team studied the images in more detail and found they...

Fomalhaut is sometimes called the Loneliest Star. Its planet Fomalhaut b was the first beyond our solar system to be visible to the human eye. The star Fomalhaut -- an autumn star for the Northern Hemisphere, sometimes called the Loneliest Star -- holds a special place in the search for planets beyond our solar system. Orbiting Fomalhaut is the first extrasolar planet visible to the eye in photographic images. By 2008, when Fomalhaut's planet became visible, we knew other planets were out there, orbiting distant suns. But, prior to the images of Fomalhaut b, all extrasolar planets, or exoplanets, made...

Paul Kalas, an astronomer at the University of California, Berkeley, and lead author on the 2008 study, says the latest image indicates that the planet's orbit crosses into the dust disk. And that has led Ray Jayawardhana, an astronomer at the University of Toronto in Canada, to question the planet's existence. On such a trajectory, the planet's gravitational influence would have previously disrupted the clearly delineated disk. "It's quite clear that the original story cannot stand anymore," Jayawardhana says. Kalas acknowledges that the latest data point is puzzling, but he says he remains confident that Fomalhaut b is a planet....

NASA Hubble Space Telescope's most detailed visible-light image ever taken of a narrow, dusty ring around the nearby star Fomalhaut (HD 216956), offers the strongest evidence yet that an unruly and unseen planet may be gravitationally tugging on the ring. Hubble unequivocally shows that the center of the ring is a whopping 1.4 billion miles (15 astronomical units) away from the star. This is a distance equal to nearly halfway across our solar system. The most plausible explanation, astronomers said, is that an unseen planet moving in an elliptical orbit is reshaping the ring with its gravitational pull. The geometrically...

The first-ever pictures of planets outside the solar system have been released in two studies. Using the latest techniques in space technology, astronomers at NASA and the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory used direct-imaging techniques to capture pictures of four newly discovered planets orbiting stars outside our solar system. "After all these years, it's amazing to have a picture showing not one but three planets," said physicist Bruce Macintosh of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, California. "The discovery of the HR 8799 system is a crucial step on the road to the ultimate detection of another Earth," he said....

NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has taken the first visible-light snapshot of a planet circling another star. Estimated to be no more than three times Jupiter's mass, the planet, called Fomalhaut b, orbits the bright southern star Fomalhaut, located 25 light-years away in the constellation Piscis Australis, or the "Southern Fish."Fomalhaut has been a candidate for planet hunting ever since an excess of dust (a telltale sign of planet formation) was discovered around the star in the early 1980s by NASA's Infrared Astronomy Satellite, IRAS. In 2004, the coronagraph in the High Resolution Camera on Hubble's Advanced Camera for Surveys produced...

Quillen used new images from the Hubble Space Telescope that caught the star, Fomalhaut, and its surrounding ring almost edge-on and in more detail than ever before. Fomalhaut, 25 light-years away, is the brightest star in the autumn sky. Using a device called a coronagraph that blocks out a star's light so dimmer objects near it can be seen, the Hubble revealed that Fomalhaut was indeed off-center within its ring. The images were also clear enough to show that the ring itself had a surprisingly sharp edge... The sharp inside edge of Fomalhaut, Quillen calculated, demanded that a relatively small,...

Astronomy Picture of the Day Discover the cosmos! Each day a different image or photograph of our fascinating universe is featured, along with a brief explanation written by a professional astronomer. 2002 October 11 Fomalhaut Dust Disk Indicates Planets Drawing Credit: David A. Hardy, ROE, ATC, NSF, NASA Explanation: One of the brightest stars on the sky likely has planets. Fomalhaut, actually the 17th brightest star in the night sky, is a mere 22 light-years away but only a fraction of the age of our Sun. Recent observations in far infrared light with a detector cooled to near zero...