Summary
The nature of Fomalhaut b became unsettled after its discovery. Fomalhaut b could be a conglomeration of rubble from a recent collision between comet-to-asteroid sized bodies and not actually identify a planet. While this scenario is possible, the likelihood of observing such a collision at the location of Fomalhaut b is extremely low. Instead, Fomalhaut b is plausibly, even likely, a planet less than twice Jupiter's mass that is either enshrouded in a spherical cloud of dust from ongoing planetesimal collisions or surrounded by a large circumplanetary ring system, either of which are responsible for scattering the primary star's light and thus making Fomalhaut b visible.
Fomalhaut b and three companions around HR 8799, whose discovery was announced simultaneously, were described as the first directly-imaged extrasolar planets in that their emission was thought to originate at least in part from a planetary atmosphere. However, subsequent studies from the Spitzer Space Telescope and a reanalysis of the original HST data instead suggest that Fomalhaut b's light is scattered starlight, not planet thermal emission.
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