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Rubble Ring
Featured on May 19, 2017
A ring of debris encircles the nearby star Fomalhaut in this new image from the ALMA telescope in Chile. The ring is more than a billion miles wide and spans about 25 billion miles (40 billion km), or almost five times the diameter of the orbit of Neptune, the Sun's most distant planet. The ring probably consists of debris from many comets that have smashed together on the outskirts of the system. Fomalhaut, one of the brightest stars of autumn skies, is 25 light-years from Earth. [ALMA (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO)/M. MacGregor]
