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It reveals an inner belt, akin to the solar system's asteroid belt but dustier and more extended; an intermediate belt; and a previously imaged outer belt that'
by causi 3y ago
It reveals an inner belt, akin to the solar system's asteroid belt but dustier and more extended; an intermediate belt; and a previously imaged outer belt that's analogous to our Kuiper Belt.
How could something analogous to our Kuiper belt possibly reflect/emit enough light to be visible as a cloudy ring? There is no way it isn't orders of magnitude more massive than the Kuiper belt.
- cl42 3y agoI was going to ask the same thing -- maybe someone more astronomically inclined has an answer to this... If one were to take a phot of our solar system, would our asteroid belt really be dense enough to show up in any wavelengths?
- causi 3y agoThe most likely explanation to me is that the author is just wrong in describing it that way and it's a much more massive debris disc slash protoplanetary disc.
- bbojan 3y agoMaybe because it's still gas and dust, whereas if the same mass coalesces into large objects it's much less reflective?
- danparsonson 3y agoAt a guess - very long exposure times. Even if it's only sending one photon per second in our direction, if we stare at it long enough then eventually we'll have an image.