NASA's Webb Exploring the Fomalhaut System: Planets, Rings, and Interstellar Dust Astronomers used NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope to image the warm dust around a nearby young star, Fomalhaut, in order to study the first asteroid belt ever seen outside of our solar system in infrared light. Overall, there are three nested belts extending out to 14 billion miles (23 billion kilometers) from the star; that’s 150 times the distance of Earth from the Sun. The scale of the outermost belt is roughly twice the scale of our solar system’s Kuiper Belt of small bodies and cold dust beyond Neptune. The inner belts – which had never been seen before – were revealed by Webb for the first time. Credits: NASA, ESA, CSA, A. Gáspár tags: Fomalhaut system exoplanets interstellar dust astronomy space exploration planetary rings planet formation alien worlds James Webb Space Telescope NASA space science