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Even the Hubble Space Telescope must have done a double-take when it snapped this spectacular image, looking for all the world like the Great Eye of Sauron from the Lord of the Rings trilogy. Hubble’s picture of the off-centre ring of dust around Fomalhaut, one of the nearest and brightest stars in the sky, offers the best evidence yet that a planet, or planets, is orbiting the star.

With Hubble’s help astronomers at the University of California, Berkeley, and NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center created a detailed picture of the ring, which is made of fine particles of dust. The ring is not centred on the star and is significantly askew, as though it is being tugged by an invisible hand. The most likely culprit is an unseen planet orbiting Fomalhaut at a distance of about a third of the radius of the ring – roughly Pluto’s distance from the sun.

The astronomers used the Hubble coronagraph, which blocks light from a star in the centre of the telescope’s field of view, to capture light from the much dimmer dust around Fomalhaut.