What was that exciting: In 2008, researchers announced in a study, for the first time they captured the visible light of an exoplanet directly with a camera. Fomalhaut b was the name of the lucky man who was to circle the star Fomalhaut, which was about 25 light years away, and whom the Hubble space telescope was said to have snapped in all its glory.
But confidence waned over time. Because further recordings did not want to clearly confirm the discovery. On the contrary. The picture became more and more diffuse. And so it didn’t take long for researchers to ask: Is Exoplanet Fomalhaut b real at all?
Probably not. The NASA Hubble Space Telescope had just observed an expanding cloud of very fine dust particles – the result of a collision between two icy bodies. At least that’s what two astronomers from the University of Arizona write now in the magazine »PNAS«.
A look at the graphic shows why astronomers were initially convinced of the existence of the exoplanet: a bright point that changed position (see below right), a supposed planet that orbits its star far. In 2014, however, the planet candidate faded under Hubble’s discovery.
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