Amateur Astronomers Found Planets Crashing Into Each Other universetoday.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from universetoday.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Pasadena CA (JPL) Dec 11, 2023 -
Astronomers found what looks like a glowing cloud of dust from a massive planetary pile-up-and NASA volunteers helped make the discovery! A recent paper in Nature describes how an international grou
Planets grow in rotating disks of dust and gas around forming stars, some of which can subsequently collide in giant impacts after the gas component is removed from the disk1–3. Monitoring programmes with the warm Spitzer mission have recorded substantial and rapid changes in mid-infrared output for several stars, interpreted as variations in the surface area of warm, dusty material ejected by planetary-scale collisions and heated by the central star: for example, NGC 2354–ID8 (refs. 4,5), HD 166191 (ref. 6) and V488 Persei7. Here we report combined observations of the young (about 300 million years old), solar-like star ASASSN-21qj: an infrared brightening consistent with a blackbody temperature of 1,000 Kelvin and a luminosity that is 4 percent that of the star lasting for about 1,000 days, partially overlapping in time with a complex and deep, wavelength-dependent optical eclipse that lasted for about 500 days. The op