Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, András Gáspár (University of Arizona), and Alyssa Pagan (STScI)

This image of the dusty debris disk surrounding the young star Fomalhaut is from Webb’s Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI). It reveals three nested belts extending out to 14 billion miles (23 billion kilometers) from the star. The inner belts – which had never been seen before – were revealed by Webb for the first time.

The Hubble Space Telescope and Herschel Space Observatory, as well as the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), have previously taken sharp images of the outermost belt. However, none of them found any structure interior to it.

These belts most likely are carved by the gravitational forces produced by unseen planets.

Provider: Space Telescope Science Institute

Image Source: https://webbtelescope.org/contents/news-releases/2023/news-2023-109

Curator: STScI, Baltimore, MD, USA

Image Use Policy: http://stsci.edu/copyright/