A planet-vaporizing impact is the leading explanation for a distant star’s curiously fluctuating light
Long ago, around an otherwise unremarkable faraway star, two infant planets had an extraordinarily bad day. The two collided in a giant impact that brought both to a violent end. Where once these worlds had twirled, the cataclysm left behind only a diminished molten lump and a churning 10-million-kilometer-wide cloud of incandescent vapor and pulverized debris that should eventually condense into a new, second-generation planet.
Using archival infrared observations from NEOWISE, as well as optical data from the Las Cumbres Observatory Global Telescope, a network of 25 modest telescopes, Kenworthy tracked the star’s wavelength-dependent changes in brightness. He found that the infrared flaring corresponded to a heat emission of 1,000 kelvins—hot enough to melt aluminum—and that it was consistent with a source around the star that was some 750 times the size of Earth.
Although planet-vaporizing collisions may seem like science fiction, for proof that they occur, one need look no further than Earth’s moon, which was likely born from a Mars-sized impactor striking our world billions of years ago. Further afield, one leading theory to account for certain quirks of our solar system’s architecture posits that early shifts in the orbits of Jupiter and Saturn sparked brutal cascades of collisions between nascent protoplanets.
If it is validated by further observations, the result will mark a first. “When you think of how long it takes to grow a planet, giant impacts are relatively short events,” says Sarah Stewart, a planetary scientist and synestia expert at the University of California, Davis, who was not involved in the study. “You have to be lucky to see one.”
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