Webb telescope finds signs of Mars-sized worlds colliding around young stars
NASA's James Webb Space Telescope has studied 21 young star systems with unusually dusty debris rings, which researchers say show evidence of planetary-scale impacts. The team led by Kate Su of the Space Science Institute, published in The Astrophysical Journal, links the collisions to the theory that Earth was struck by a Mars-sized body that helped form the Moon.
Bottom line — About one-third of the 21 disks show chemistry consistent with Mars-sized impacts, though no one has yet observed such a collision directly.
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Extreme debris disks are rare: the researchers estimate only about 1% of young stars show this stage, according to the NASA release.
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Su's team sorted the disks by mineral chemistry into silica-rich systems, roughly one-third of the sample, and silica-poor systems, the remaining two-thirds.
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According to the researchers, silica-rich disks appear only around stars younger than 300 million years, while silica-poor disks span a much wider range of ages.
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Morning Overview notes that five of the 21 disks come from the archive of NASA's retired Spitzer Space Telescope, which operated from 2003 until 2020.
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Attila Moor of Konkoly Observatory cautioned that only three disks in the sample fit the older-age criteria, so the hypothesis still needs more observations.
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The silica-poor disks' irregular brightness changes are, according to the researchers, compatible with the Late Heavy Bombardment hypothesis for our own solar system.