Teams of astronomers used the combined power of NASA's Hubble and James Webb space telescopes to revisit the legendary Vega disk.
Teams of astronomers used the combined power of NASA 's Hubble and James Webb space telescopes to revisit the legendary Vega disk.
Webb sees the infrared glow from a disk of particles the size of sand swirling around the sizzling blue-white star that is 40 times brighter than our Sun. Hubble captures an outer halo of this disk, with particles no bigger than the consistency of smoke that are reflecting starlight. "We're seeing in detail how much variety there is among circumstellar disks, and how that variety is tied into the underlying planetary systems. We're finding a lot out about the planetary systems -- even when we can't see what might be hidden planets," added Su."There's still a lot of unknowns in the planet-formation process, and I think these new observations of Vega are going to help constrain models of planet formation.
Planets are suggested as shepherding bodies around Fomalhaut that gravitationally constrict the dust into rings, though no planets have been positively identified yet."Given the physical similarity between the stars of Vega and Fomalhaut, why does Fomalhaut seem to have been able to form planets and Vega didn't?" said team member George Rieke of the University of Arizona, a member of the research team.
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