NASA Hubble Spots Colliding Planets Around Nearby Star
- NASA's hubble Space Telescope has discovered new clues around a nearby star that strengthen the idea that the object previously seen there was not a planet but the...
- A team of astronomers observed a new,faint spot of light near the inner edge of the wide dust ring surrounding Fomalhaut in 2023.
- Both objects appeared at locations where scientists think they where debris from high-speed collisions between large planetesimals, the building blocks of early exoplanets.
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Hubble witnesses Cosmic Collision Around Nearby Star Fomalhaut
NASA‘s hubble Space Telescope has discovered new clues around a nearby star that strengthen the idea that the object previously seen there was not a planet but the result of a giant space collision.
A team of astronomers observed a new,faint spot of light near the inner edge of the wide dust ring surrounding Fomalhaut in 2023. The object was very similar to previous detections in the mid-2000s, which had gradually faded.
Both objects appeared at locations where scientists think they where debris from high-speed collisions between large planetesimals, the building blocks of early exoplanets. Capturing such a rare event was “amazing,” said paul Kalas,the lead researcher at UC Berkeley.
Together these two detections provide direct evidence that big cosmic collisions still occur in mature planetary systems. By observing these impacts in near real-time, scientists can estimate how frequently enough these kinds of collisions occur, how much material is released, and how the debris – and the planets that might emerge from it – continue to evolve long after a star forms.
“This is certainly the frist time I’ve seen a point of light appear out of nowhere in an exoplanetary system,” Kalas said in a statement. “This was not present in all previous Hubble images, which means we have just witnessed a violent collision between two massive objects and a huge cloud of debris unlike anything occurring in our solar system today.”
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Fomalhaut lies around 25 light years away in the constellation Piscis Austrinus, aka the Southern Fish, and is one of the brightest stars in the night sky. It is surrounded by several belts of dust and debris, material left over from the planet formation process, similar to the Kuiper Belt in our solar system near Neptune.
In 2004, Hubble spotted a compact source within this belt, nicknamed Fomalhaut b. at the time, scientists debated whether it was a planet surrounded by dust or something else. In 2008, some believed that this could be the first exoplanet discovery made with a visible light telescope.