James Webb Space Telescope finds a 'hot Jupiter' exoplanet that defies expectations James Webb Space Telescope finds no atmosphere on Earth-like TRAPPIST-1 exoplanet '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!'' 'We definitely didn't expect the more complex structure with the second intermediate belt and then the broader asteroid belt,' Wolff said. That means there may well be a planet or two lurking in the rings around Fomalhaut. Just like Jupiter dominates the main asteroid belt and Neptune sculpts the Kuiper Belt, astronomers believe that debris disks outside the solar system may be shaped by unseen planets. 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.' 'But we need the JWST to allow us to image a dozen or so asteroid belts elsewhere. 'With Hubble and ALMA, 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. Going forward, astronomers hope to image debris disks like Fomalhaut's around other stars using JWST. 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. 'Where the JWST really excels is that we're able to physically resolve the thermal glow from dust in those inner regions. None of those instruments were able to see the interior structure within the outer belt, however. '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.įomalhaut's outermost belt, which is twice as large as the Kuiper Belt, has been imaged previously by the Hubble Space Telescope, the Herschel Space Observatory and the ground-based Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA). 'I would describe Fomalhaut as the archetype of debris disks found elsewhere in our galaxy, because it has components similar to those we have in our own planetary system,' András Gáspár of the University of Arizona, the lead author of a study announcing the new results, said in a statement. Debris disks form later, after planets are in place. The dust belts around the young star are thought to be debris from collisions between larger bodies like asteroids and comets, and are therefore referred to as 'debris disks.' These disks are different than protoplanetary disks, which hold material that later gloms together to form planets.

Space novel james michener