The object's discovery was initially announced in 2008 and confirmed in 2012 via images taken with the Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) on the Hubble Space Telescope.

[5] The object was one of those selected by the International Astronomical Union as part of NameExoWorlds, their public process for giving proper names to exoplanets.

[9][10][11] The planetary hypothesis has since fallen out of favor; more gathered data suggested a dust or debris cloud is far more likely, and the object was placed on an escape trajectory.

The recent research of the Fomalhaut system used the JWST's NIRCam equipped with coronagraphs to probe the complex dust ring in different wavelengths of infrared light.

The absence of detection in certain wavelengths support the idea that Fomalhaut b is not a massive planet but rather a dust cloud resulting from a collision among planetesimals.

[25] They reanalyzed the original Hubble data using new, more powerful algorithms for separating planet light from starlight and confirmed that Fomalhaut b does exist.

They considered two models to explain the SED: (1) a large circumplanetary disk around a massive, but unseen, planet and (2) the aftermath of a collision during the past 100 years of two Kuiper belt objects of radii about 50 km.

Fomalhaut b's high eccentricity may be evidence for a significant dynamical interaction with a hitherto unseen planet at a smaller orbital separation.

[29] Observations by the James Webb Space Telescope in 2023 did not detect Fomalhaut b in the infrared, confirming its nature as a dust cloud and not a planet.

Longer duration observations are anticipated to enhance signal strength and reduce noise, potentially enabling detection of smaller objects.

Furthermore, the Cycle 2 program may clarify S7's association with Fomalhaut and identify additional planets hinted at by the complex disk structure revealed in the MIRI results, as outlined by the authors.