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Ollaborative effort between professional and amateur astronomers has led to the discovery of a massive collision between two ice giant planets in a distant star system.
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 ...
Don't let light pollution put you off. Follow our beginner's guide to stargazing and doing observational astronomy from towns and cities.
Who is the greatest astronomer of all time? No astronomer can be deemed the best, but here are some of the most famous names in the history of astronomy.