Scientists observing a 300-million-year-old Sun-like star (which is young) saw a great glowing cloud they believe is from a cosmic collision between two exoplanets.
The star suddenly dipped in brightness, and when researchers looked closer they saw, just before the dip, the star displayed a spike in infrared luminosity.
When studying the young star, they also found the bright luminosity lasted for 1,000 days, but 2.5 years into the event, it was unexpectedly eclipsed by something, which caused the darkness, with the eclipse lasting for around 500 days.
When the team investigated deeper they found the spike in brightness and darkness was a giant, glowing cloud of gas and dust. They believe the space cloud stemmed from a cosmic collision between two exoplanets, with one of them containing ice.
It’s not uncommon for planets to collide, and NASA scientists believe there are remnants of previous collisions in our solar system. They say remaining clues like Uranus’ tilt and Earth’s moon point to times in our history when the huge rocks slammed into one another, changing their shape and place in orbit.
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They think two giant exoplanets, anywhere from several to tens of Earth masses, crashed into one another. This collision created both the infrared spike and the glowing dust cloud.
A huge impact like this would completely liquify the planets and would leave behind a single molten core surrounded by hot rock, gas and dust.
The cloud is still holding the remains of the collision orbits the star after the crash, and is eventually moving in front of and eclipsing the sun-like star.
NASA says while data revealed the aftermath of the collision, the glow is still visible from the James Webb Space Telescope, and researchers are putting together proposals to observe it.
The study was published in Nature by lead author Matthew Kenworthy, with 21 co-authors, on October 11, 2023. It was conducted using archival data from NASA’s now-retired WISE mission, and the star was first detected in 2021 by the ground-based robotic survey All-Sky Automated Survey for Supernovae.
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