Window mode follows your eyes with your camera, in this browser only: no picture or position leaves your device.
Fomalhaut planet
ESA, NASA, and L. Calcada (ESO for STScI)
2008-11-13
- Classification
- Photograph
- Museum
- Wikimedia Commons
- Credit line
- Hubble Directly Observes Planet Orbiting Fomalhaut
- Rights
- Public domain, as the museum states it.
- Who can see it
- Teens profiles and older: its museum says too little about what it shows to place it for younger viewers. How works are placed
About this work
This illustration shows the newly discovered planet, Fomalhaut b, orbiting its sun, Fomalhaut. A structure comprised mostly of brown and gold colors surrounds Fomalhaut b. This structure is a Saturn-like ring that astronomers say may encircle the planet. Fomalhaut also is surrounded by a ring of material. The edge of this vast disk is shown in the background as the curving cloud-like feature that appears to intersect the 200-million-year-old star. Fomalhaut b lies 1.8 billion miles inside the disk's inner edge. The planet completes an orbit around Fomalhaut every 872 years.
