Episode 534 - Finding a rocky asteroid belt around another star

Asteroid belts are harder to find than Sci-fi would have you believe. Spotting an asteroid belt is easier in the outer solar system, but closer in it gets a bit more blurry. Using the JWT we can use more than just visible light to find tricky interstellar objects. Asteroid belts are messy but they can tell us a lot about a solar system by what they leave in their wake. 

Reference:

1. András Gáspár, Schuyler Grace Wolff, George H. Rieke, Jarron M. Leisenring, Jane Morrison, Kate Y. L. Su, Kimberly Ward-Duong, Jonathan Aguilar, Marie Ygouf, Charles Beichman, Jorge Llop-Sayson, Geoffrey Bryden. Spatially resolved imaging of the inner Fomalhaut disk using JWST/MIRI. Nature Astronomy, 2023; DOI: 10.1038/s41550-023-01962-6