Astronomers spot rare planetary collision light-years away
Astronomers just caught a super rare event: two exoplanets crashing into each other around Gaia20ehk, a star 11,000 light-years from Earth.
They first noticed the star's weird flickering back in 2016, and by 2021 things got even stranger.
Turns out, all that drama could be debris from the collision heating up and glowing in infrared: a possible sign of planets colliding.
Cosmic crashes could help us understand how planetary systems form
This discovery is a big deal for understanding how planets form and evolve.
As researcher Anastasios Tzanidakis put it, the flickering was due to copious rock and dust passing in front of the star, consistent with debris from a planetary collision.
Events like this are hardly ever seen because they play out over decades.
The team thinks studying these cosmic crashes could reveal how planetary systems, maybe even ones like ours, come together and what it takes to make worlds that can support life.