The James Webb Space Telescope, successor to Hubble, has for the first time captured an asteroid belt outside our solar system, American space agency NASA has said. The images showed astronomers warm dust around Fomalhaut, a young star, located 25 light-years from Earth in the Piscis Austrinus constellation. In a release, NASA said that there were three nested belts extending out to 23 billion kilometres from the star - which is about 150 times the distance of Earth from the Sun.
Astronomers first discovered a single belt of debris around Fomalhaut in 1983. Webb's observations revealed two additional rings nearer the star - a bright inner one and a narrow intermediate one.
The dusty belts are the debris from collisions of larger bodies, analogous to asteroids and comets, and are frequently described as 'debris disks', said NASA.
"I would describe Fomalhaut as the archetype of debris disks found elsewhere in our galaxy, because it has components similar to those we have in our own planetary system," said Andras Gaspar of the University of Arizona in Tucson and lead author of a new paper describing these results.
"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," the researcher added.
Hubble had previously taken sharp images of the outermost belt. However, it could find any structure interior to it. The inner belts have been resolved for the first time by Webb in infrared light.
According to news agency Reuters, Fomalhaut is 16 times more luminous than the Sun and almost twice as massive. It is about 440 million years old - less than a tenth the age of the Sun - but is probably nearly halfway through its lifespan.
