HST ACS/HRC Wide View of Fomalhaut System

This image of the area around the star Fomalhaut was taken with the Advanced Camera for Surveys instrument aboard NASA's Hubble Space Telescope. The region around Fomalhaut's location is black because astronomers used the Advanced Camera's coronagraph to block out the star's bright glare so that a dim planet, Fomalhaut b, could be seen. The planet is 1 billion times fainter than its star. The radial streaks are scattered starlight. The red dot at lower left is a background star.

The Fomalhaut system is 25 light-years away in the constellation Piscis Australis.

This false-color image was taken in October 2004 and July 2006.

About the data

HST Proposal: 10390 P. Kalas and J. Graham (University of California, Berkeley) and M. Clampin (NASA Goddard Space Flight Center); and 10598 P. Kalas, J. Graham, and E. Chiang (University of California, Berkeley), M. Clampin (NASA Goddard Space Flight Center), and K. Stapelfeldt and J. Krist (NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory).

The science team includes: P. Kalas and E. Chiang (University of California, Berkeley), M. Fitzgerald (Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory), M. Clampin (NASA Goddard Space Flight Center), E. Kite (University of California, Berkeley), J. Krist and K. Stapelfeldt (NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory), and J. Graham (University of California, Berkeley).