Astronomers recently witnessed two planets collide in a violent, chaotic collision 11,000 light-years from Earth.
This rare cosmic event isn’t something scientists see every day.
But thanks to some chance, a University of Washington researcher stumbled across breadcrumbs while looking at old telescope data, which led him to this surprising discovery. A distant star located nearly halfway from Earth to the center of the Milky Way experienced a brief dip in brightness before an apparent outburst of chaos.
“It was around 2021 that things went completely crazy,” study lead author Anastasios Tzanidakis, a researcher at the University of Washington, said in a statement. “I can’t stress enough that stars like our sun don’t do this. So when we saw this, we were like ‘Hello, what’s going on here?'”
According to a study published March 11 in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, researchers claim that this phenomenon has never been observed before, leading them to conclude that what they saw was evidence of a planetary collision.
Here’s everything you need to know about wild finds.
Astronomers find evidence of two planets colliding 11,000 light-years away
By reviewing old telescope data from 2020, Chanidakis discovered that an otherwise unremarkable star began to behave strangely.
This artistic illustration depicts a planetary collision that astronomers believe will occur in 2021, approximately 11,000 light-years from Earth.
Starting around 2016, Gaia 20ehk, a star in the southern sky in the constellation Puppis, experienced three unusual dips in brightness. After further investigation, Chanidakis concluded that the strange flickering had nothing to do with the star itself.
Instead, according to the press release, “large amounts of rock and dust” pass in front of the distant star as it orbits the same planetary system, intermittently dimming the star’s light as it reaches Earth. Further investigation revealed something remarkable: the source of the debris was likely the remnants of two planets colliding with each other.
To come to their conclusion, Chanidakis and study co-author James Davenport, an astronomer at the University of Washington, used telescopes to examine fluctuations not only in visible light but also in infrared light. That’s how researchers noticed that whenever visible light flickered, there was a surge of invisible infrared light, indicating that the material blocking the star was very hot.
“This was probably caused by the two planets getting closer to each other,” Chanidakis said. “Initially, they had a series of side impacts that didn’t produce a lot of infrared energy. Then, they had a catastrophically large collision.”
How are planets formed?
Planet formation is preceded by the birth of stars, which are formed when accumulations of gas and dust collapse due to gravity. Scientists believe that this is usually followed by the formation of planets, which emerge from giant donut-shaped disks of gas and dust around young stars called protoplanetary disks.
Gravity and other forces cause materials like dust, gas, ice or rock fragments to collide and, if gentle enough, glue the materials together to form planets (called planetesimals) that grow like rolling snowballs.
NASA explains that these planetesimals begin orbiting their new stars, and as the stars devour nearby gas, they push material away and push more distant material further out, forming additional worlds within the solar system.
Researchers say that although this process is common throughout the universe, scientists rarely witness such collisions with their own eyes.
Collision between planets could illuminate Earth and moon
What’s more, Chanidakis and Davenport’s research shows that this collision is similar to the one that created Earth and its bizarre moons some 450 million years ago. That’s because clouds of dust orbiting distant stars are about the same distance from the sun to Earth, which would allow the material to eventually cool and solidify into something similar to our planet and our only natural satellite.
Even more fascinating, the researchers believe this discovery could be just the tip of the iceberg if evidence of more planetary collisions exists – some of which could be habitable worlds.
“Few other planetary collisions of any kind have ever been recorded, and none bear so much resemblance to the impact that created the Earth and Moon,” Chanidakis said in the statement. “If we can observe more moments like this elsewhere in the galaxy, it will teach us a lot about the formation of worlds.”
Eric Lagatta is Space Connect reporter for the USA TODAY Network. Please contact him at elagatta@usatodayco.com
This article originally appeared in USA Today: Astronomers witness ‘crazy’ collision of two planets
