{"id":456366,"date":"2025-12-18T21:38:20","date_gmt":"2025-12-18T21:38:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/456366\/"},"modified":"2025-12-18T21:38:20","modified_gmt":"2025-12-18T21:38:20","slug":"hubble-images-reveal-the-aftermath-of-two-cosmic-collisions","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/456366\/","title":{"rendered":"Hubble images reveal the aftermath of two cosmic collisions"},"content":{"rendered":"

NEW YORK (AP) \u2014 NASA\u2019s Hubble Space Telescope<\/a> got a rare look at the aftermath of two cosmic collisions \u2014 and helped scientists solve a decades-old mystery.<\/p>\n

Many years ago, scientists saw a dense, bright spot near a young star called Fomalhaut. They thought it could be a planet and continued to track it. <\/p>\n

But in 2023, Hubble\u2019s pictures revealed something strange. The bright spot had vanished \u2014 and a new one had appeared \u2014 a sign that it wasn\u2019t a planet after all. <\/p>\n

Scientists had stumbled on the dusty debris from two cosmic crashes. Massive space rocks slammed together to create clouds of dust that were thick enough to masquerade as planets. Over time, the remains spread out and eventually disappeared altogether.<\/p>\n

Scientists think the space rocks involved in the collision were at least 37 miles (60 kilometers) wide. It\u2019s rare to capture such clashes on camera, especially since theories suggest they only happen in the same vicinity about once every 100,000 years.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s \u201chighly unexpected\u201d that this area \u201chas now exhibited two, unique, massive collisions inside 20 years,\u201d said Joshua Lovell with the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in an email. He had no role in the study, which was published Thursday in the journal Science.<\/p>\n

The new observations could just be a lucky find. Or, they could mean that such smashups happen more often than scientists thought. It\u2019ll take more data to know for sure.<\/p>\n

Collisions of large space rocks are essential to how planets like ours form and what they\u2019re made of. Studying them is \u201clike taking a toddler picture of our solar system,\u201d said astrophysicist Meredith MacGregor with Johns Hopkins University, who was not involved with the study.<\/p>\n

Researchers plan to track the new dust cloud in the coming years to see how it changes and eventually disintegrates.<\/p>\n

The star near the collision site is in our cosmic neighborhood, just 25 light years from Earth. A light year is nearly 6 trillion miles.<\/p>\n

By keeping an eye on it, scientists are \u201ccatching these violent explosions in real time,\u201d said study author Paul Kalas with the University of California, Berkeley.<\/p>\n

___<\/p>\n

The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute\u2019s Department of Science Education and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The AP is solely responsible for all content.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"NEW YORK (AP) \u2014 NASA\u2019s Hubble Space Telescope got a rare look at the aftermath of two cosmic…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":456367,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[24],"tags":[9603,4514,165,27902,159,783,4810,67,132,68],"class_list":{"0":"post-456366","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-space","8":"tag-asteroids","9":"tag-astronomy","10":"tag-national-aeronautics-and-space-administration","11":"tag-planets","12":"tag-science","13":"tag-space","14":"tag-stars","15":"tag-united-states","16":"tag-unitedstates","17":"tag-us"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115742736780489239","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/456366","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=456366"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/456366\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/456367"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=456366"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=456366"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=456366"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}