There has been plenty of excitement in recent decades about planets detected orbiting various stars beyond our solar system. But planets provide an incomplete picture of the complex framework that exists around stars, leaving out components like the belts of rocky and icy debris orbiting our sun.
Scientists on Monday unveiled observations by the James Webb Space Telescope showing new details about such features around a luminous star called Fomalhaut in our own neighborhood of the Milky Way galaxy. These observations of three concentric dusty rings of debris orbiting Fomalhaut provide the fullest view to date of such structures outside our solar system.
Fomalhaut, one of the brightest stars in our night sky and the brightest in the southern constellation Piscis Austrinus, is located 25 light years from Earth. A light year is the distance light travels in a year, 9.5 trillion km.
