The James Webb Space Telescope has taken pictures of a debris disc around a nearby star in unprecedented detail
, which is about 32 light years from Earth, has two known exoplanets – one about 10 times as massive as Earth, and one twice the mass of that. Both are closer to their small star than Mercury is to the sun.
Beyond the orbits of those two worlds, things in the AU Mic system are chaotic. AU Mic is relatively young, about 23 million years old, so the system is also full of leftover planetary building blocks. These so-called planetesimals smash into one another and create a huge. By blocking out the intense light from the star itself, JWST captured this disc in more detail than ever before.
Deeper studies of this image and others that are planned will help researchers study the evolution of planetary systems, but they have a more ambitious goal as well: directly observing planets that are relatively small andSign up to our free
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