Hubble Space Telescope images revealed that the ring of dust surrounding
Fomalhaut was off-center.
Fomalhaut, about 200 million years old and 26 light-years from Earth, appears to be surrounded by a disk roughly centered on a cavity that may have been cleared by planets.
Fomalhaut has been a candidate for planet hunting ever since an excess of dust was discovered around the star in the early 1980s by the US- UK-Dutch Infrared Astronomy Satellite (IRAS).
Fomalhaut, Beta Pictoris, and our own sun are main-sequence stars because they fuse hydrogen into helium to generate energy.
The first three relatively nearby main-sequence stars with imaged planets all belong to spectral type A: HR 8799,
Fomalhaut, and Beta Pictoris.
Ironically, little Piscis Austrinus, the Southern Fish, possesses a "big" star in 1st-magnitude
Fomalhaut.
Even the dim
Fomalhaut Hour has the bright Summer Triangle in the west connected by a Milky-Way-backed arc of constellations stretching to bright Auriga and Taurus in the northeast and east-northeast.
Finally, HST produced the first direct visible-light image of a planet orbiting another star--the bright southern star
Fomalhaut (S&T: March 2009, page 22).
A single fish lies lower right of Cetus, far below the Circlet and the Square, but Piscis Austrinus is uninteresting save for 1st-magnitude
Fomalhaut, which means "Mouth of the Fish."
One of IRAS's most surprising discoveries was the finding by Fred Gillett (Kitt Peak National Observatory) and George Aumann (JPL) that some familiar stars such as Vega and
Fomalhaut have excess emission at 25 microns.
For example, infrared satellite observatories--which can see into the dusty birthplaces of stars--revealed cold disks of gas and dust orbiting many familiar stars like Vega,
Fomalhaut, and Beta Pictoris.
Fomalhaut shines at magnitude 1.17 (almost identical to Pollux) and is located 25 light-years from Earth (almost identical to Vega's distance).