![]() Once the planets form around a star, debris belts form and become shaped by the gravity of the planets. The idea of the disk originated from astronomers Immanuel Kant and Pierre-Simon Laplace in the late 18th century. Stars form from gas and dust, and then a ring of leftover material called a protoplanetary disk orbits the star, where planets are born. The cloud is separate from another feature spied by Hubble in 2008 that might have been a planet - but further observations showed the object disappeared by 2014, implying another collision that left only dust in its wake. Webb also observed a feature Gáspár calls "the great dust cloud," where two celestial bodies might have collided in the outer ring. "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."ĪLSO SEE: NASA releases new images from Webb telescope showing 'Stephan's Quintet,' 'Cosmic Cliffs,' moreĬombining Webb's new observation along with images taken previously by Hubble, the European Space Agency's Herschel Space Observatory and the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array of telescopes can provide scientists with a more detailed view of how belts of debris form around stars. "I would describe Fomalhaut as the archetype of debris discs found elsewhere in our galaxy, because it has components similar to those we have in our own planetary system," said lead study author András Gáspár, assistant research professor of astronomy at the University of Arizona in Tucson, in a statement. Then, the dust was shaped into belts by the gravitational influence of what the researchers believe are unseen planets that orbit the star, the same way Jupiter and Neptune shape our asteroid belt and the inner edge of the Kuiper Belt. Webb's new view revealed Fomalhaut's two inner belts for the first time, which didn't appear in previous images taken by the Hubble Space Telescope or other observatories.įomalhaut's massive dust belts were likely created from the debris left behind as larger bodies such as asteroids and comets collided. RELATED: James Webb Telescope inspects spiral galaxies, revealing never-before-seen details of star formation But the Webb researchers weren't expecting to see three nested rings of dust extending out 14 billion miles (23 billion kilometers) from the star - or 150 times the distance of Earth from the sun. The dusty disk around Fomalhaut was initially discovered in 1983 using NASA's Infrared Astronomical Satellite. The space observatory focused on the warm dust that encircles Fomalhaut, a young, bright star located 25 light-years from Earth in the Piscis Austrinus constellation, CNN reported. ![]() ![]() For scientists: More details can be found on the telescope page.Astronomers unveiled some cosmic surprises using the James Webb Telescope.Īstronomers used the James Webb Space Telescope to observe the first asteroid belt seen outside of our solar system and unveiled some cosmic surprises along the way.ESO Faint Object Spectrograph and Camera version 2 (EFOSC).Star formation, protoplanetary systems, Galactic center, spectroscopy. The telescope dome is relatively small, and is ventilated by a system of flaps that makes air flow smoothly across the mirror, reducing turbulence and leading to sharper images. The design of the octagonal enclosure housing the NTT is another technological breakthrough. This technology, developed by ESO, known as active optics, is now applied to all major modern telescopes, such as the Very Large Telescope at Cerro Paranal and the future Extremely Large Telescope. The secondary mirror position is also actively controlled in three directions. The main mirror is flexible and its shape is actively adjusted by actuators during observations, using a reference star, to preserve the optimal image quality. The 3.58-metre New Technology Telescope (NTT) was inaugurated in 1989, and it broke new ground for telescope engineering and design.
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