April 17, 2012 | 3 Two thousand comets a day collide around
nearby star Fomalhaut creating a continually replenished dust
belt in the outskirts of the star’s system, according to a new
paper recently published in the journal Astronomy &
Astrophysics. Fomalhaut is a young star. It is twice as massive
as the sun and sits 25 light years away from us. In the 1980s,
astronomers discovered that it was surrounded by large amounts
of dust. The Herschel Space Observatory has now produced the
best ever far-infrared images of the star system and given a
team of astronomers lead by Bram Acke at the University of
Leuven in Belgium chance to take a fresh look at the system.
Most intriguing is a narrow belt of dust and debris in the outer
edges of the Fomalhaut system, that is a bit like the solar
system’s own Kuiper belt. Fomalhaut’s belt is 140 times further
from the star than the Earth is from the sun. The dust particles
that fill it have temperatures between -170C and -230C. In our
solar system, the Kuiper belt includes