The The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) found evidence of two giant asteroids crashing into each other in a nearby star system. The colossal collision threw up 100,000 times more dust than the impact he killed the dinosaurs.
A violent impact recently occurred in Beta Pictoris, a star system located 63 light-years away in the constellation Pictoris.
Beta Pictoris is a baby compared to our own solar system – it’s only been around for 20 million years compared to our system’s respectable 4.5 billion years. It was first detected in 1983 by NASA’s Infrared Astronomical Satellite (IRAS) and is believed to have been formed by the shock wave of a nearby supernova.
While the young star system currently contains at least two gas giant planets, it has no known rocky worlds like our own. But rocky inner planets may be in the process of forming, thanks to large dust-producing collisions like the one observed by JWST, the scientists behind the new findings said in a presentation on Oct. 244th Meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Madison, Wisconsin.
Because it’s still very young, the star system’s circumstellar debris disk—the huge ring of gas and dust surrounding a star—is a significantly more violent place than our own, making it an ideal place for astronomers to study turbulent early years systems forming planets. The team added that their findings could offer a rare glimpse into the history of our own solar system.
“Beta Pictoris is at an age where planet formation in the terrestrial planet zone is still taking place through giant asteroid collisions, so what we could be seeing here is essentially how rocky planets and other bodies are forming in real time,” lead author studies. Christine Chenastronomer from Johns Hopkins University, he said in a statement.
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To capture a picture of the distant asteroid crash, astronomers trained the powerful eye of JWST on the system and found that the giant masses of clumped silicate dust discovered by the Spitzer Space Telescope in 2004 to 2005 had completely disappeared.
This means that sometime 20 years ago, there probably was a gigantic collision between two asteroids that crushed the bodies into a huge amount of dust with particles smaller than pollen or powdered sugar, Chen said.
“With Webb’s new data, our best explanation is that we actually witnessed the aftermath of a rare, cataclysmic event between large asteroid-sized bodies, marking a complete change in our understanding of this star system,” Chen said.
The researchers suggest that their findings will help astronomers better understand how the architecture of star systems is constructed and how often habitable systems like ours form.
“The question we’re trying to contextualize is whether this whole process of terrestrial and giant planet formation is common or rare, and an even more fundamental question: Are planetary systems like the Solar System that rare?” Study co-author Kadin Worthen, a doctoral student in astrophysics at Johns Hopkins University, said in a statement. “Basically, we’re trying to understand how weird or average we are.”