Wow! NASA James Webb Telescope snaps unique dusty disk near red dwarf
NASA’s James Webb Telescope has captured a never-before-seen image of a dusty disk around a red dwarf star. Learn more details.
NASA’s most expensive telescope, the James Webb Space Telescope, has surprised scientists again by snapping previously unseen images of the deep universe. Here again, the Webb telescope has clicked into the inner workings of a dusty disk around a nearby red dwarf star. NASA says these are the first observations ever. The new image shared by the Webb telescope provides clues to the disk’s composition.
“A debris disk is continually replenished by planetary collisions. By studying it, we get a unique window into the recent dynamical history of this system,” said Kellen Lawson of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, STAR au Mic. the study’s lead author said in a blog. This star system is said to be one of the very few examples of a young star with a known exoplanet. It’s close and bright enough to study the debris disk as a whole, using the James Webb Telescope’s uniquely powerful instruments, said Josh Schleide, principal investigator at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center.
This star system, named AU Microscopius or AU Mic, is located 32 light-years away in the southern constellation Microscopium, approximately 23 million years old. This means that planet formation has ended because that process typically takes less than 10 million years. The star has two known planets, while the dusty debris disk is thought to have resulted from collisions between the remaining planets.
Tech Behind Dusty Disk Near Red Dwarf Star
To study this star system AU Mic, the research team used the Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam) of NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope. “With the help of NIRKAM’s coronagraph, which blocks out the intense light of the central star, they were able to study the region very close to the star,” says NASA. This NIRCam of the Webb telescope allows researchers to detect a disk as close as 5 astronomical units, or 460 million miles, to the star, which is equivalent to the orbit of Jupiter in our solar system.
