Dust ring around the
star Fomalhaut is created in the collision of comets thousands every day.
Located only at a
distance of 25 light years from Earth, Fomalhaut is a fairly young star, twice
as massive as our sun, and discovered in 1980 in a large amount of dust.
Now, astronomers using
a telescope Herschel discovered a dense strip of dusty materials, about half of
which is water ice at the edges of the system.
Time is very far from
the star, at a distance of more than 100 times the distance from Earth to the
Sun. Because of this it is very cold, about -200 degrees Celsius.
This disk is similar to
the Kuiper Belt in our solar system, which is beyond the planet Neptune, but
much younger.
Dusty zone is narrow
and is not centered with respect to the star, meaning that there may not be a
planet orbiting close around her.
To obtain such a
quantity of dust requires the equivalent of comets, whose total area is 2000
km, and which should be destroyed every day.
Such a large number of
collisions mean that there are trillions of comets in this ring, containing as
much material as is equivalent to one hundred planets like our Earth.
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