A NASA telescope spotted the debris cloud, forming hundreds of light-years away.
, called HD 166191. The star's size and brightness, along with the debris cloud observations, allowed astronomers to estimate the size of the cloud, along with the size of the possible impacting objects.
HD 166191's neighborhood is full of debris, in part because the star is relatively young: just 10 million years old, compared with the's 4.5 billion years. Dust left behind by the young star's formation is now clumping together to create planetesimals — the possible"seeds of future planets," JPL called them.
Ground-based telescopes had also spotted the transits, and combining that data with the Spitzer data allowed scientists to estimate the dust cloud's size and shape.
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