Spectacular Cosmic Collision Captured in New Hubble Image

Spectacular cosmic collision captured in new Hubble image

By Claire Cameron edited by Jeanna Bryner

When the solar system began to form, everything was chaos. A multitude of rocky materials collided in a maelstrom 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 occurring around another star about 25 light years away. The Fomalhaut star stands out as one of the brightest in the night sky and is known for being shrouded in bands of dust and debris.

In 2008, astronomers examining Fomalhaut discovered a potential planet orbiting the star. Later observations, however, showed the orb fading, leading some to wonder whether it was a planet or debris left behind by a collision between two smaller objects. By 2014, he had disappeared. And in a new study published in Science, astronomers describe how, in 2023, they found a different bright spot that resembles the previously discovered object.

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Its sudden appearance – and the planet’s proposed disappearance – suggest that both are the remnants of violent collisions between two massive objects. The observations run counter to older hypotheses about such accidents, according to Paul Kalas, an astronomer at the University of California, Berkeley and co-author of the new study.

“Previous theory suggested there should be a collision every 100,000 years, or more. Here, in 20 years, we’ve seen two,” Kalas said in a statement. “If you had a movie of the last 3,000 years, and it was sped up so that each year lasted only a fraction of a second, imagine how many flashes you would see in that time. The Fomalhaut planetary system would sparkle with these collisions.”

In the future, Kalas and his colleagues hope to use the James Webb Space Telescope to glean the composition of the dust left behind by the crash, including any evidence that it contains water ice. These and other observations of Fomalhaut and its surrounding debris could offer new clues about how planetary systems like ours merge and evolve.

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