                        Astronomy Picture of the Day

    Discover the cosmos! Each day a different image or photograph of our
      fascinating universe is featured, along with a brief explanation
                    written by a professional astronomer.

                                 2023 May 6

                        Fomalhaut's Dusty Debris Disk
      Image Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, Processing: András Gáspár (Univ. of
    Arizona), Alyssa Pagan (STScI), Science: A. Gáspár (Univ. of Arizona)
                                   et al.

   Explanation: Fomalhaut is a bright star, a 25 light-year voyage from
   planet Earth in the direction of the constellation Piscis Austrinus.
   Astronomers first noticed Fomalhaut's excess infrared emission in the
   1980s. Space and ground-based telescopes have since identified the
   infrared emission's source as a disk of dusty debris surrounding the
   hot, young star related to the ongoing formation of a planetary system.
   But this sharp infrared image from the James Webb Space Telescope's
   MIRI camera reveals details of Fomalhaut's debris disk never before
   seen, including a large dust cloud in the outer ring that is possible
   evidence for colliding bodies, and an inner dust disk and gap likely
   shaped and maintained by embedded but unseen planets. An image scale
   bar in au or astronomical units, the average Earth-Sun distance,
   appears at the lower left. Fomalhaut's outer circumstellar dust ring
   lies at about twice the distance of our own Solar System's Kuiper Belt
   of small icy bodies and debris beyond the orbit of Neptune.

                       Tomorrow's picture: Halley dust
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       Authors & editors: Robert Nemiroff (MTU) & Jerry Bonnell (UMCP)
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