HD 216956   HR 8728    alfa PsA    HIP 113368    GJ 881
RA (2000) = 22 57 39.0465      Dec (2000) = -29 37 20.050
SpT = A3V    V =1.16 mag    d = 7.688 pc
Proper Motion (mas/yr) = +329.22, -164.21

The Press Release has further information, with many more figures, illustrations, and animations.
An pdf version of a preprint is available here.

The scientific paper is published in the journal Nature on June 23, 2005.
The full literature reference is:
Paul Kalas, James R. Graham and Mark Clampin, 2005
"A planetary system as the origin of structure in Fomalhaut's dust belt", Nature, Vol. 435, pp. 1067 -- 1070.

A transcript of introductory remarks by the Prinicple Investigator Dr. Paul Kalas during the NASA Press Conference on July 22 may be found by clicking here

Brief Science History:

1) Like most bright stars, Fomalhaut has been studied extensively by astronomers, with nearly 400 references in refereed astronomy journals, beginning as early as 1897. Evidence suggests that Fomalhaut is one member of a wide separation binary. The second member is HR 8721, a K4V star nearly 2 degrees away (55,000 AU) from Fomalhaut (Gliese & Jahreis 1988).

2) Warm thermal emission due to circumstellar dust around Fomalhaut was first detected using NASA's Infrared Astronomical Satellite in 1984. The first papers about Fomalhaut's infrared excess were published by H.H. Aumann (1985) and F. Gillett (1986). Other stars that had this excess included Vega and Beta Pic, but only Beta Pic revealed a nebulosity that could be mapped at optical wavelengths with a CCD (Smith & Terrile 1984). The Beta Pic image essentially confirmed that the IRAS infrared excess seen around nearby main sequence stars is due to dusty disks that are replenished by the collisional erosion of comets and asteroids orbiting these stars.

3) From 1984 to 1998, Beta Pic was the most-studied debris disk because it could be easily analyzed at optical, near-infrared, and mid-infrared wavelengths. Ground-based efforts to directly detect the dust around Fomalhaut using CCD's were unsuccessful (Smith et al. 1989, Kalas & Jewitt 1996). Fomalhaut is 2.7 magnitude brighter than Beta Pic, and hence the glare from the star made the detection of nebulosity surrounding it much more difficult. Moreover, Beta Pic is a younger star and possesses a much greater quantity of dust, making its disk brighter.

4) Zuckerman & Becklin (1993) scanned the region around Fomalhaut using the James-Clerk Maxwell Telescope (JCMT) at 800 microns (a.k.a. "submillimeter wavelengths") and determined that the material surrounding Fomalhaut has a north-south orientation on the sky.

5) In 1998, Holland et al. published a resolved image of warm material surrounding Fomalhaut, again with the JCMT telescope at 850 microns. However, with angular resolution of about 15 arcseconds, which corresponds to linear resolution of 115 AU at Fomalhaut, these maps showed two brightness peaks north and south of the star interpretted as a torus of material around the star.

6) From 1998 to 2004, thermal maps of dust emission using the JCMT, as well as the Spitzer Space Telescope, provided a wealth of knowledge about the dust around Fomalhaut. In particular, the southern lobe was found to be slightly warmer than the northern lobe. Research groups such as those led by Mark Wyatt and Karl Stapelfeldt proposed that one side of Fomalhaut's dust belt could be warmer than the other side if the star was slightly closer to one side of the belt. This idea was supported by dynamical simulations that showed such effects are possible if the system contains another massive object, such as a planet, with an eccentric orbit. This companion object could be located either interior or exterior to the belt.

Some of the Popular History:

1) Fomalhaut is derived from the Arabic phrase Fam al-Hut, which means "Mouth of the Fish". Fomalhaut lies in a fishy constellation, not the familiar Pisces, but Pisces Austrinus, which is the Southern Fish. Fomalhaut can be seen with the naked eye from much of the Northern Hemisphere, and very well from the Southern Hemisphere.

2) Fomalhaut is the 17th brightest star in the sky and one of four royal star, or guardian stars, of the heavens. Aldebaran, Regulus, and Antares are guardians of the stars in the East, North, and West, respectively. Fomalhaut guards the southern sky. (source: http://www.winshop.com.au/annew/Fomalhaut.html, and references therin)

3) Fomalhaut is visible in the southern autumn sky. Since there are no other bright stars nearby it is relatively easy to find and over the ages has been referred to as the "solitary one". (source: http://www.souledout.org/cosmology/highlights/fomalhaut/fomalhaut.html)

Basic facts about Fomalhaut:

1) Fomalhaut is a young main sequence star 25 light years from the Sun, with age estimates between 100 Myr and 300 Myr.

2) the dust grains are large, 10-100 microns in size, and the estimated total mass is 1.4 lunar mass (1.0x10^26 g or 5.0x10^-8 M_sun).

3) the dust structure is a torus viewed 24 degrees away from edge-on, with inner and outer radii of 133 and 158 AU, respectively.