JAKARTA (RIAUPOS.CO) — For the first time astronomers managed to see the warm glow of a world-destroying collision between two massive planets after aiming their telescopes at a distant star similar to the sun.
Reporting from The Guardian, this devastating event is believed to have destroyed a pair of ice giant planets that collided with each other.
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The colliding ice produces a shower of debris and hot rotating objects potentially hundreds of times the size of Earth.
“This would be absolutely spectacular,” said Dr Matthew Kenworthy, one of the lead authors of the study at the Leiden Observatory in the Netherlands.
“The energy of the collision would have transformed the remnant into something resembling a star, fainter than the main star in the system but about seven times larger in size, visible throughout the star system.”
This discovery came after an amateur astronomer responded to a social media post from Kenworthy about the star known as ASASSN-21qj.
Kenworthy was looking for the shadow cast by the giant ring around the planet as it crossed the face of its parent star.
ASASSN-21qj, located 1,800 light years from Earth, caught his attention because in December 2021 it dimmed suddenly and inexplicably.
While reading the post, Arttu Sainio, a volunteer citizen scientist for NASA, checked past observations of the star by NASA’s Neowise mission, an infrared space telescope.
He found that 900 days before the star dimmed, Neowise saw a steady, sustained brightness of infrared light from the same location.
Source: Jawapos.com
Editor: Rinaldi
2023-10-12 07:24:00
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