Blown to dust: the first exoplanet visible in a telescope is no more

In 2008, researchers looking at images from the Hubble Space Telescope found a bright spot moving around the star Fomalhaut located 25 light-years from Earth. At 400 million years old, Fomalhaut is still relatively young. The star, twice as heavy as the Sun and 17 times brighter, is also circled by a dust disk that the researchers identified as a remnant from planetary formation.

Fomalhaut b was thus the first exoplanet detected through direct, optical imaging, not just indirectly through...