Fomalhaut’s dust belt was discovered in the 1980s by the Infrared Astronomical Satellite, a joint project of the United States, the United Kingdom and the Netherlands. Herschel’s new images of the belt (shown above) show it in much more detail at longer infrared wavelengths than ever before.

The results indicate the grains in the dust belt are fluffy and tiny — only a few millionths of a meter across. They are similar to dust particles released from comets in our own solar system.

Bram Acke of the University of Leuven in Belgium led the observations. He and his colleagues say the dust is being regenerated in the belt through continuous collisions between comets. Each day, the equivalent of either two comets 10 kilometers in size or 2,000 comets 1 kilometer in size must be completely crushed into small fluffy, dust particles. The team estimates between 260 billion and 83 trillion comets in the belt.

Read the full European Space Agency story at http://www.esa.int/SPECIALS/Herschel/SEM1XBHWP0H_0.html.