South of Aquarius, and well west of Beta Ceti, is
Fomalhaut, the lone 1st-magnitude star of the traditional autumn constellations.
Lonely
Fomalhaut is at its not-very-high culmination (the highest it ever appears) due south on our sky map.
On November 13, Chiang and his colleagues announced they had imaged a planet around
Fomalhaut, a bright, nearby star surrounded by a ring of dust.
Using the James Clerk Maxwell submillimeter radio telescope on Mauna Kea, researchers have found that two of the brightest stars in the sky,
Fomalhaut and Vega, possess disks that may have begun to spawn planets.
The process reproduces patterns for a range of disk types; however, it can't totally explain gaps in disks with very high or low concentrations of gas, such as the controversial TW Hydrae and
Fomalhaut systems.
Far lower right of Jupiter twinkles bright, lonely
Fomalhaut. More directly below Jupiter is Beta Ceti, or Diphda.
Estimated to be no more than three times Jupiter's mass, the planet, called
Fomalhaut b, orbits the bright southern star
Fomalhaut, located 25 light-years away in the constellation Piscis Austrinus.
Now, astronomers have used a French radio telescope to map the dust encircling nearby
Fomalhaut, the second star proved conclusively to have such a disk.
When, on a November evening, does low
Fomalhaut or the beautiful spiral galaxy NGC 253 appear over or between the trees to your south?
About two-thirds of the way between Markab and 1st-magnitude
Fomalhaut, low in the south, is 3.3-magnitude Delta ([delta]) Aquarii.
These observations reveal the debris ring around the star
Fomalhaut in exceptional detail.
At the bottom of the pile is Piscis Austrinus, the Southern Fish, which lays claim to
Fomalhaut, the region's only 1st-magnitude star.