The University of Arizona team's discovery marks the first time the debris cloud from such a collision has been observed and measured.
1 of 2 An illustration shows a debris cloud around the young star called HD 166191. The cloud was likely created by a collision between two large asteroid-like objects that might be the seeds of future planets around the star.
The team led by Kate Su, a research professor in the UA Steward Observatory, used NASA’s now-retired Spitzer Space Telescope to collect more than 100 infrared images of the star, called HD 166191, between 2015 and 2019. "For the first time, we captured both the infrared glow of the dust and the haziness that dust introduces when the cloud passes in front of the star," said Everett Schlawin, assistant research professor at Steward Observatory.
The main objects that crashed into each other were at least the size of Vesta, a rock 330 miles wide in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. And that’s at a minimum, Su said. “In reality they had to be bigger.” Similar cataclysms are thought to have led to the formation of the Earth and moon and other objects in our solar system.
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