File:Illustration of Collision of Protoplanetary Bodies in the Fomalhaut Star System (2020-09-4626).png

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Captions

This artist's illustration depicts the collision of two 125-mile-wide icy, dusty bodies orbiting the bright star Fomalhaut, located 25 light-years away.

Summary[edit]

Description
English: This artist's illustration depicts the collision of two 125-mile-wide icy, dusty bodies orbiting the bright star Fomalhaut, located 25 light-years away. Astronomers believe that Hubble Space Telescope observations, spanning several years, provide observational evidence for the first-ever detection of such a titanic collision in another star system. What was first thought to be a planet orbiting Fomalhaut eventually faded and disappeared from view in the Hubble snapshots. The interpretation is that the object wasn't a planet at all, but an expanding cloud of dust from a collision between two equally massive bodies. Ballooning to over 200 million miles across, the cloud is now so diffuse it has fallen below Hubble's detection limit. Smashups like this are estimated to happen around Fomalhaut once every 200,000 years. Therefore, Hubble was looking at the right place at the right time to capture this transient event.
Date 20 April 2020 (upload date)
Source Illustration of Collision of Protoplanetary Bodies in the Fomalhaut Star System
Author ESA, NASA, and M. Kornmesser
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Licensing[edit]

Public domain This file is in the public domain because it was created by NASA and ESA. NASA Hubble material (and ESA Hubble material prior to 2009) is copyright-free and may be freely used as in the public domain without fee, on the condition that only NASA, STScI, and/or ESA is credited as the source of the material. This license does not apply if ESA material created after 2008 or source material from other organizations is in use.
The material was created for NASA by Space Telescope Science Institute under Contract NAS5-26555, or for ESA by the Hubble European Space Agency Information Centre. Copyright statement at hubblesite.org or 2008 copyright statement at spacetelescope.org. For material created by the European Space Agency on the spacetelescope.org site since 2009, use the {{ESA-Hubble}} tag.

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