Massive cosmic collisions observed

 Astronomers witness asteroids violently colliding thru NASA telescope

In a cosmic fireworks display, scientists observed two objects colliding around a bright star outside our solar system. In a scientific first, astronomers have witnessed the impact of two objects violently colliding in space, generating a dusty debris cloud reminiscent of cosmic fireworks. Astronomers were observing a nearby young star. While surveying distant worlds beyond our solar system, researchers unexpectedly obtained the first direct images showing objects colliding within a nearby star system. In the early life of a star system, space can be a chaotic crash zone. Pieces of rock and ice such as comets and asteroids frequently collide, sometimes breaking apart and sometimes sticking together. Over time, this constant jostling helps transform the original dust and frozen material in a stellar nebula into planets and moons. The biggest smashups are thought to be uncommon across the hundreds of millions of years it takes to build a full planetary system, occurring only about once every 100,000 years. 

The collision occurred 25 light-years from Earth around a star known as Fomalhaut. Younger, brighter and more massive than the sun, Fomalhaut sits at the center of a system much like our own solar system. It is one of the brightest stars we can see; skywatchers in the Northern Hemisphere can glimpse it looking south during autumn, within the constellation Piscis Austrinus. Even so, astronomers have now identified the aftermath of two major impacts in just 20 years around the nearby star Fomalhaut. This could mean researchers happened to catch two rare events by chance, or it could suggest that massive collisions are more common during planet formation than models predict. The events, first seen in 2004 and again in 2023, mark the first time scientists have directly imaged collisions between large bodies in any planetary system beyond our own. “We just witnessed the collision of two planetesimals and the dust cloud that gets spewed out of that violent event, which begins reflecting light from the host star,” said Paul Kalas, adjunct professor of astronomy at the University of California, Berkeley, and first author of the report. “We do not directly see the two objects that crashed into each other, but we can spot the aftermath of this enormous impact.” Over tens of thousands of years, he said, the dust around Fomalhaut would be “sparkling with these collisions”, like twinkling holiday lights. The planet discovery has now turned to dust. What he thought was a planet was likely the dust cloud kicked up by the collision of planetesimals.

Scientists have watched Fomalhaut since discovering a dust belt around the star in 2004 using the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s Hubble Space Telescope, which orbits our planet. In Hubble’s new observations, the recent collision resembled a luminous inkblot. This extraordinary event is unlike anything in our own present-day solar system. The occurrence shows the sequence of events leading up to the creation of dust cloud cs2 around the star Fomalhaut. In the opening frames, Fomalhaut appears in the top left corner. Two white dots, located in the bottom right corner, represent the two massive objects in orbit around Fomalhaut. These objects approach each other and collide, resulting in a huge debris cloud which initially resembles an exoplanet. Years later, starlight is able to push the dust cloud outward from the star. Based on the brightness of both the 2004 and 2023 events, the colliding objects are at least 60 kilometers (37 miles) across, at least four times larger than the object that collided with Earth 66 million years ago and killed off the dinosaurs. Objects of this size are referred to as planetesimals, objects similar in size to many of the asteroids and comets in our solar system but much smaller than a dwarf planet like Pluto. “Fomalhaut is much younger than the solar system, but when our solar system was 440 million years old, it was littered with planetesimals crashing into each other,” Kalas said. “That’s the time period that we are seeing, when small worlds are being cratered with these violent collisions or even being destroyed and reassembled into different objects. It’s like looking back in time in a sense, to that violent period of our solar system when it was less than a billion years old.”

“This is the first time we have seen a point of light appear out of nowhere in a planetary system,” said Mark Wyatt, professor of astrophysics at the University of Cambridge and co-author of a paper describing the collision. Paul Kalas began looking for a dusty disk around Fomalhaut in 1993, aiming to spot debris left behind after planets form. Fomalhaut lies just 25 light years from Earth and is relatively young at about 440 million years old, making it a useful stand-in for what the solar system may have resembled early in its history. Using NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope (HST), he later confirmed that the star is surrounded by such a disk. In 2008, he also reported a bright point of light near the disk that appeared to be a planet and was the first exoplanet candidate directly imaged at optical wavelengths. Following the standard naming convention, he labeled it Fomalhaut b. “This is a new phenomenon, a point source that appears in a planetary system and then over 10 years or more slowly disappears,” he said. “It’s masquerading as a planet because planets also look like tiny dots orbiting nearby stars.” The point of light revealed a collision between asteroids, the first ever seen, according to Paul Kalas, an astronomer at the University of California, Berkeley, and lead study author. The space rocks were about 37 miles across, dwarfing Manhattan. “The Fomalhaut system is a natural laboratory to probe how planetesimals behave when undergoing collisions, which in turn tells us about what they are made of and how they formed,” said Kalas’s colleague, Mark Wyatt, a theorist and professor of astronomy at the University of Cambridge in UK. “The exciting aspect of this observation is that it allows us to estimate both the size of the colliding bodies and how many of them there are in the disk, information which it is almost impossible to get by any other means.”

The composite Hubble Space Telescope have shown the debris ring and dust clouds cs1 and cs2 around the star Fomalhaut. For comparison, dust cloud cs1, imaged in 2012, is pictured with dust cloud cs2, imaged in 2023. When dust cloud cs2 suddenly appeared, astronomers quickly realized they had witnessed the violent collision of two massive objects. Previously thought to be a planet, cs1 is now classified as a similar debris cloud. Paul Kalas estimates that there are about 300 million objects around Fomalhaut the size of the ones which collided to generate these bright clouds of dust. Previous observations of the star detected the presence of carbon monoxide gas, which indicates that these planetesimals are volatile-rich and therefore very similar in composition to the icy comets in our solar system, he said. Fomalhaut, located within the southern constellation Piscis Austrinus, is 16 times more luminous than our sun and one of the brightest stars in the sky. After Kalas began observing it with HST in 2004, he discovered a large belt of dusty debris at a distance of 133 astronomical units (AU) from the star, more than three times the distance from the star as the Kuiper Belt is from the sun in our solar system. An AU is the average distance between the Earth and the Sun, or 93 million miles. To Kalas, the belt’s sharp inner edge suggested that it had been sculpted by planets. After a second observation in 2006, he concluded that a bright spot in the outer belt visible in both the 2004 and 2006 images was, in fact, a planet. He acknowledged at the time that it could be a very bright dust cloud caused by a collision in the disk, but the likelihood of that seemed very low.

The most peculiar aspect of the unprecedented observation, the authors said, is that such events might not be as rare as astronomers once thought. Following the 2004 discovery, Kalas noted a curious bright spot near Fomalhaut. At first, he and his colleagues thought the speck was a planet. But by 2014, it had vanished. Kalas was able to schedule four follow-up HST observations of Fomalhaut, in 2010, 2012, 2013, and 2014. In the last, however, Fomalhaut b was nowhere to be seen. Nine years later, after three failed attempts to image Fomalhaut with HST, he obtained a new image which revealed another bright spot not far from the first, which is now referred to as Fomalhaut cs1, for circumstellar source 1. Based on its location, however, the new spot, dubbed Fomalhaut cs2, could not be a reappearance of Fomalhaut cs1. Because of the nine-year hiatus between the 2014 and 2023, it’s unclear when Fomalhaut cs2 appeared. In the new paper, Kalas and an international team of astronomers analyzed the 2023 image of Fomalhaut and a subsequent, though poor image obtained in 2024, and concluded that it could only be light reflected from a dust cloud produced by the collision of two planetesimals. Kalas noted that at first, Fomalhaut cs1 moved like an exoplanet, but by 2013 its path had curved away from the star. This type of motion would be possible for very small particles being pushed outward by the radiation pressure of starlight. The appearance of cs2 supports the idea that cs1 was in fact a dust cloud.

As planets can’t mysteriously disappear, the solution to the celestial whodunit, Kalas recently concluded, was they had instead seen a dust cloud, the remnants of another collision just like the one described in the new paper. “We learned a lesson, OK? And that is that these dust clouds can appear like planets reflecting starlight,” he said. “So you actually can be fooled for years.” Kalas compares these events to the dust cloud generated in 2022 when NASA’s DART (Double Asteroid Redirection Test) mission slammed into the moonlet Dimorphos, which was orbiting the asteroid Didemos. The cloud around Fomalhaut is about a billion times larger, the team estimated. Kalas has been awarded time over the next three years to use the James Webb Space Telescope’s Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam) and the HST to observe Fomalhaut and track the evolution of the cloud to see if it expands in size and determine its orbit. It is already 30% brighter than Fomalhaut cs1. Additional observations in August 2025 confirmed that cs2 is still visible. Kalas’s group spotted evidence for both collisions, the recent and the decades-old one, in the large belt of debris that encircles Fomalhaut. The dusty girdle is the result of millions of impacts between rocky and icy bits that range from the size of sand grains to far larger objects that astronomers call planetesimals, better known as asteroids or comets. “What we’ve learned is that we have to be careful because these little dots, these points of light, that we may see in orbit around a star could actually be fresh dust clouds rather than planets,” Kalas said.

In anticipation of future space missions to directly image exoplanets, Kalas cautioned astronomers to be on the lookout for dust clouds masquerading as planets. “These collisions that produce dust clouds happen in every planetary system,” he said. “Once we start probing stars with sensitive future telescopes such as the Habitable Worlds Observatory, which aims to directly image an Earth-like exoplanet, we have to be cautious because these faint points of light orbiting a star may not be planets.” Researchers had thought the largest of such planetesimal collisions were rare, perhaps one occurring every 100,000 years. Yet, spotting two in as many decades suggests otherwise, Wyatt said. Meanwhile, Kalas will continue to use Hubble, as well as NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, to keep tabs on Fomalhaut’s environs. Other co-authors of the paper are UC Berkeley research astronomer Thomas Esposito; former UC Berkeley graduate students Jason Wang, now at Northwestern University in Illinois and Michael Fitzgerald, now at UCLA; former UC Berkeley postdoctoral fellow Robert De Rosa, now at the European Southern Observatory in Chile; Maxwell Millar-Blanchaer of UC Santa Barbara; Bin Ren of Xiamen University in China; Maximilian Sommer of the University of Cambridge; and Grant Kennedy of the University of Warwick in the UK. The work was supported by NASA (NAS5-26555, GO-HST-17139). A big takeaway, according to Kalas, is recognizing that dust clouds generated by colliding asteroids could be masquerading as planets in neighboring planetary systems. Future NASA efforts include imaging Earth-like planets around other stars as the agency searches for other habitable worlds.