JWST captures amazing images of debris orbiting nearby star

NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope observed a glowing debris disk left over from the formation of a planet around a nearby star called AU Microscopii.

The red dwarf AU Microscopii, or AU Mic, is surrounded by debris from the planet’s formation process. The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) captured this debris disk in unprecedented detail, helping us understand how planetary systems evolve around small stars.

AU Mic, which is about 32 light-years from Earth, has two known exoplanets – one about 10 times as massive as Earth, and the other twice as large. Both are closer to their little star than Mercury is to the Sun.

Outside the orbits of these two worlds, everything is chaotic in the AU Mic system. AU Mic is relatively young, around 23 million years old, so the system is also full of leftover planetary building blocks. These so-called planetesimals collide with each other and create a huge disk of dust and rocks. By blocking out the intense light from the star itself, JWST captured this disk in more detail than ever before. The graphic star in the image represents the location of the AU Mic, and the dotted line represents the area where the JWST is blocking light.

“This system is one of the very few examples of a young star with known exoplanets and a debris disk that is close enough and bright enough to be studied holistically using Webb’s unique powerful instruments,” said Josh Schlider of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. The head of the group that took the pictures, the statement said.

“Our first look at the data far exceeded expectations. It was more detailed than we expected. It was brighter than we expected. We found the disc closer than expected. We hope that as we dig deeper, we will have a few more surprises that we did not foresee,” Schlider said.

A deeper study of this image and others planned will help researchers study the evolution of planetary systems, but they also have a more ambitious goal: direct observation of relatively small planets that are far from their stars. They are extremely difficult to find using other methods, but JWST can detect them.

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texasstandard.news contributed to this report.

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