NASA's James Webb telescope clicks first asteroid belt ever seen outside solar system

All of us know about the asteroid belt in our Solar System. The asteroid belt is a collection of millions of space rocks, some of which are still a mystery to us. It is also said that asteroids are mini-planets which couldn't make the cut to join the elite league of main planets in our solar system. Who knows what mysteries liehidden in the asteroid belt!

Now, James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has snapped a picture of a solar system. To the surprise of scientists, the solar system shows the presence of three asteroid belts. Two are in the inner system, while the third is farther out. With this pic, JWST has clicked the first asteroid belt ever seen outside our solar system.

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(Image: NASA)

The solar system is being formed around the young star Fomalhaut. It is 25 light-years away from us. Though this distance appears huge, it is nothing when compared on a cosmic scale. The three asteroid belts are extending out to 14 billion miles (23 billion kilometres) around the star. This is 150 times the distance between Earth and the Sun.

Hubble Space Telescope, JWST's predecessor, had clicked the outer asteroid belt before. But JWST's powerful ability to take images in Infrared light has meant that we can now glean deeper into the Fomalhaut solar system.

"Where Webb really excels is that we're able to physically resolve the thermal glow from dust in those inner regions. So you can see inner belts that we could never see before," Schuyler Wolff, an astronomer at the University of Arizona who worked on the research, said, as quoted on the NASA website.

Fomalhaut can be located by the naked eye as it is the brightest star in the southern constellation Piscis Austrinus.

According to NASA, the asteroid belts around Fomalhaut are likely to have been carved out of gravitational fields of planets we haven't yet been able to see.

Asteroid belts are often affected by the gravity of planets in a particular star system. For example, the massive gravitational force exerted by Jupiter, the biggest planet in our solar system, keeps the asteroids in their particular orbit and largely locked in space.

“The belts around Fomalhaut are kind of a mystery novel: Where are the planets?” said George Rieke, another team member and US science lead for Webb’s Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI), which made these observations. “I think it's not a very big leap to say there's probably a really interesting planetary system around the star.”

“We definitely didn't expect the more complex structure with the second intermediate belt and then the broader asteroid belt,” added Wolff. “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!’”

Rieke was quoted by NASA.

The results of the research by the team have been published in the journal Nature Astronomy.

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