Astronomy

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ALMA images

a star’s icy ring

40 to 50

light-years

The distance at which a super-

nova could fry all life on Earth.

Fomalhaut, a young star 25 light-years away,
is famous for its debris disk; it is one of very
few stars around which astronomers have
directly imaged planets. This image com-
bines comprehensive millimeter-wavelength
data from the Atacama Large Millimeter/
submillimeter Array (orange) and the Hubble
Space Telescope (blue). Excess light from the
star itself is blocked in the center (black) using
an instrumental mask. A bright band sur-
rounds the star at a distance of 12 billion miles
(20 billion km). The band is likely composed of
icy dust resulting from interactions between
comets and planetesimals in the system, and
it has been narrowed through gravitational
influences exerted by Fomalhaut’s planets.
The increased brightness observed at the
disk’s most distant points is caused by dust
particles “bunching up” as they orbit more
slowly when they’re farther from their star,
then speeding up and spreading out again as
they get near the closest point to their sun in
their orbit. — A. K.

ALMA (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO), M. MACGREGOR; NASA/ESA HUBBLE, P. KALAS; B. SAXTON (NRAO/AUI/NSF)
THE COMPLETE PICTURE. This image combines
ALMA data (orange) with optical data from Hubble
(blue). The dark region filters the star’s brilliant light.

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