As well as helping us learn about the earliest galaxies in the universe and taking stunning images of parts of our solar system, the James Webb Space Telescope is also letting astronomers learn more about how planets form. Although we know that planets form from disks of dust and gas around stars called protoplanetary disks, there’s still a lot we don’t know about this process, particularly about how forming planets affect the rest of the system around them.
So it was an exciting moment when astronomers recently used Webb to study an asteroid belt in another planetary system and were able to peer into the rings of dust around the star to see where planets were forming.
Webb was used to study to study the Fomalhaut star, located in the constellation Piscis Austrinus, which is forming planets in a manner that is similar to what happened in our solar system around 4 billion years ago. The forming planets themselves aren’t visible, but the researchers could infer their presence based on the gaps in the dusty disk. They saw three concentric disks stretching a total of 14 billion miles from the star.
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