Spectacular cosmic collision captured in new Hubble image
NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope captured asteroids colliding with each other in a planetary system around a star about 25 light years away.
NASA, ESA, Paul Kalas (UC Berkeley); Image Processing: Joseph DePasquale (STScI)
When the solar system began to form, everything went haywire. A mass of rocky material was clumping together in a whirlpool that would eventually become the baby protoplanets, comets and asteroids that make up our cosmic neighborhood.
And now NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has captured a similar violent clash taking place around another star about 25 light-years away. The star, Fomalhaut, appears as one of the brightest stars in the night sky and is thought to be shrouded in bands of dust and debris.
Astronomers investigating Fomalhaut in 2008 discovered a possible planet orbiting the star – however, subsequent observations revealed that the sphere was fading, leading some to question whether it was a planet or debris left over from a collision between two smaller objects. By 2014 it had disappeared. And in a new study published in Science, astronomers explain how, in 2023, they found a different point of light Which is similar to the previously discovered object.
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Its sudden appearance – and the proposed planet’s disappearance – suggest that both are remnants of a violent collision between two massive objects. According to Paul Kalas, an astronomer at the University of California, Berkeley, and co-author of the new study, the observation refutes old hypotheses about such accidents.
“Previous theory suggested there should be a collision every 100,000 years or so. Here, in 20 years, we’ve seen two,” Kalas said. statement“If you had a movie of the last 3,000 years, and it was sped up so that every year is a fraction of a second, imagine how many flares you would see during that time, The planetary system of Fomalhaut would be sparkling from these collisions,”
In the future, Kalas and his colleagues hope to use the James Webb Space Telescope to gather the composition of the dust left over from the crash, including any evidence of water ice. These and other observations of Fomalhaut and its surrounding debris may provide new clues about how planetary systems like ours coalesce and evolve.
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