The debris structures around the star Fomalhaut are more complex than comparable features in our own solar system.
"By looking at the patterns in these rings, we can actually start to make a little sketch of what a planetary system ought to look like — if we could actually take a deep enough picture to see the suspected planets," Gáspár added.
Fomalhaut's outermost belt, which is twice as large as the Kuiper Belt, has been imaged previously by the, the Herschel Space Observatory and the ground-based Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array . None of those instruments were able to see the interior structure within the outer belt, however.
"Where the JWST really excels is that we're able to physically resolve the thermal glow from dust in those inner regions. So you can see inner belts that we could never see before," study team member Schuyler Wolff, also of the University of Arizona, said in the same statement. Going forward, astronomers hope to image debris disks like Fomalhaut's around other stars using JWST., we were able to image a bunch of Kuiper Belt analogs, and we've learned loads about how outer disks form and evolve," Wolff continued."But we need the JWST to allow us to image a dozen or so asteroid belts elsewhere. We can learn just as much about the inner warm regions of these discs as Hubble and ALMA taught us about the colder outer regions.
"We definitely didn't expect the more complex structure with the second intermediate belt and then the broader asteroid belt," Wolff said."That structure is very exciting, because any time an astronomer sees a gap and rings in a disk, they say, 'There could be an embedded planet shaping the rings!'"
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