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The first planet to be discovered outside our solar system isn't a planet at all, and may be a giant dust cloud created by the collision of two icy asteroids, a study finds. Twelve years ago, astronomers spotted what they thought was a Saturn-like planet in the Fomalhaut star system 25 light years from Earth, and called it Fomalhaut b. But now researchers from the University of Arizona claim the visible and infrared images of the 'planet' captured by the Hubble Space Telescope were actually of a cosmic collision. The team studied the images in more detail and found they...

A recent report threw light on the existence of Fomalhaut b, the exoplanet. It was in 2008 that NASA had claimed to have spotted a bright object in a gap in the disc of a planet, which was then claimed to be the first exoplanet. However, things changed later when they could not spot the same using other telescopes, including Hubble's infrared cousin Spitzer, and they asserted it to be a mass of wandering dust. Apparently, it was when Thayne Currie, an astronomer at the University of Toronto, decided to explore it further, that they administered new analytic techniques to...

Fomalhaut is sometimes called the Loneliest Star. Its planet Fomalhaut b was the first beyond our solar system to be visible to the human eye. The star Fomalhaut -- an autumn star for the Northern Hemisphere, sometimes called the Loneliest Star -- holds a special place in the search for planets beyond our solar system. Orbiting Fomalhaut is the first extrasolar planet visible to the eye in photographic images. By 2008, when Fomalhaut's planet became visible, we knew other planets were out there, orbiting distant suns. But, prior to the images of Fomalhaut b, all extrasolar planets, or exoplanets, made...

Paul Kalas, an astronomer at the University of California, Berkeley, and lead author on the 2008 study, says the latest image indicates that the planet's orbit crosses into the dust disk. And that has led Ray Jayawardhana, an astronomer at the University of Toronto in Canada, to question the planet's existence. On such a trajectory, the planet's gravitational influence would have previously disrupted the clearly delineated disk. "It's quite clear that the original story cannot stand anymore," Jayawardhana says. Kalas acknowledges that the latest data point is puzzling, but he says he remains confident that Fomalhaut b is a planet....