Sometimes wishes do come true.

One of my absolute to wishes was for the James Webb telescope to image the star Fomalhaut .

This was originally shown to have a dusty disk by earlier observations, then we were told that there were a couple of planets. Then the discovery of planets was retracted.

And that’s how the situation rested before the James Webb. Now the James Webb has imaged Fomalhaut in much more detail. The dusty disk is there, but instead of a planet there is an unexplained dust clump in the disk.

https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap230511.html

mollwollfumble said:

Sometimes wishes do come true.

One of my absolute to wishes was for the James Webb telescope to image the star Fomalhaut .

This was originally shown to have a dusty disk by earlier observations, then we were told that there were a couple of planets. Then the discovery of planets was retracted.

And that’s how the situation rested before the James Webb. Now the James Webb has imaged Fomalhaut in much more detail. The dusty disk is there, but instead of a planet there is an unexplained dust clump in the disk.

https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap230511.html

See also https://webbtelescope.org/contents/news-releases/2023/news-2023-109#section-id-2

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.

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.

Webb also imaged “the great dust cloud” that may be evidence for a collision occurring in the outer ring between two protoplanetary bodies. This is a different feature from a suspected planet first seen inside the outer ring by Hubble in 2008. Subsequent Hubble observations
showed that by 2014 the object had vanished. A plausible interpretation is that this newly discovered feature, like the earlier one, is an expanding cloud of very fine dust particles from two icy bodies that smashed into each other.

Clump eh?

mollwollfumble said:

mollwollfumble said:

Sometimes wishes do come true.

One of my absolute to wishes was for the James Webb telescope to image the star Fomalhaut .

This was originally shown to have a dusty disk by earlier observations, then we were told that there were a couple of planets. Then the discovery of planets was retracted.

And that’s how the situation rested before the James Webb. Now the James Webb has imaged Fomalhaut in much more detail. The dusty disk is there, but instead of a planet there is an unexplained dust clump in the disk.

https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap230511.html

See also https://webbtelescope.org/contents/news-releases/2023/news-2023-109#section-id-2

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.

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.

Webb also imaged “the great dust cloud” that may be evidence for a collision occurring in the outer ring between two protoplanetary bodies. This is a different feature from a suspected planet first seen inside the outer ring by Hubble in 2008. Subsequent Hubble observations
showed that by 2014 the object had vanished. A plausible interpretation is that this newly discovered feature, like the earlier one, is an expanding cloud of very fine dust particles from two icy bodies that smashed into each other.

Keep in mind that Fomalhaut is only 25 light-years (7.7 pc) from the Sun. That’s really close. Much closer than ALL the planets studied by the Kepler space telescope. Alpha Centauri is 4.37 light years away. Sirius is 8.6 light years. I think Fomalhaut counts as the eighth nearest star brighter than the Sun. Something like that.

https://bigthink.com/starts-with-a-bang/fomalhaut-great-dust-cloud/?fbclid=IwAR0Qpx0TwcL2Ycyy4_bi-2fzhyJZSEfTMFUqmYu5dzwS0YUCDc-FtBjkOfs

One of the nearest, bright stars with a debris disk around it, Fomalhaut, has recently been imaged by a series of powerful observatories: Hubble, ALMA, Keck, and JWST. The JWST data revealed a number of striking features: three separate belts, gaps between them, and a “bright spot” just inside one of the belts, identified as a Great Dust Cloud. However, the full suite of observations, going back more than a decade, suggest a different explanation: it’s not a dust cloud at all, but a far more distant background object, like a sub-millimeter galaxy.

Lots of pics and bite-sized info at link.