Fomalhaut

star

Also known as: Alpha Piscis Austrini

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History

Fomalhaut, the 18th star (excluding the Sun) in order of apparent brightness. It is used in navigation because of its conspicuous place in a sky region otherwise lacking in bright stars. It lies in the southern constellation Piscis Austrinus, 25 light-years from Earth. A white star, it has an apparent magnitude of 1.16. A sixth-magnitude companion star, HR 8721, is yellow and orbits at a distance of about 0.9 light-year. A belt of dust orbits between 19.9 and 23.6 billion km (12.4 and 14.7 billion miles) from the star. The dust belt appears to be filled with comets like the solar system’s Kuiper belt. Its infrared brightness indicates that every day about 2,000 comets about 1 km (0.6 mile) in size are colliding with each other. Images taken with the Hubble Space Telescope in 2004 and 2006 seemed to show a planet, Fomalhaut b, orbiting inside the dust belt at a distance of 17.8 billion km (11.1 billion miles) from the star. However, subsequent images taken from the Spitzer Space Telescope showed no such planet. Hubble images showed that the planet was fading, and in 2014 Hubble was unable to see the planet. Astronomers proposed that Fomalhaut b was not a real planet but rather an expanding dust cloud left behind by a collision between two cometlike bodies.