In a solar system about 1,800 light-years from Earth, two planets smacked into one another in an impact that vaporized them both. And astronomers caught them in the act.
“The possible detection of a post-impact body is really exciting,” says astrophysicist Philip Carter of the University of Bristol in England, who was not involved in the new study. “As far as I’m aware, no one’s claimed this before.”
As is often the case for exciting astronomical discoveries, detecting the aftermath of this cosmic smackdown involved more than a little luck.
Astronomer Matthew Kenworthy wasn’t hunting for giant impacts. “I was looking for rings” around exoplanets, he says (SN: 2/1/15). So he was scouring telescope survey data for stars that flicker or dim in unusual ways. And when the ASAS-SN survey — an ongoing project to monitor the entire sky for exploding stars — captured the sunlike star ASASSN-21qj repeatedly dimming in visible light, “I immediately jumped on it,” says Kenworthy, of Leiden Observatory in the Netherlands.
2023-10-11 10:00:38
Article from www.sciencenews.org