While searching for exoplanets, scientists captured the first direct images of colliding objects in a neighboring star system. “We just witnessed the collision of two planetesimals and the dust cloud that gets spewed out of that violent event, which begins reflecting light from the host star,” said Paul Kalas, adjunct professor of astronomy at the University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley), and first author of the report. “We do not directly see the two objects that crashed into each other, but we can spot the aftermath of this enormous impact.”
Other co-authors of the paper are UC Berkeley research astronomer Thomas Esposito; former UC Berkeley graduate students Jason Wang, now at Northwestern University in Illinois, and Michael Fitzgerald, now at UCLA; former UC Berkeley postdoctoral fellow Robert De Rosa, now at the European Southern Observatory in Chile; Maxwell Millar-Blanchaer of UC Santa Barbara; Bin Ren of Xiamen University in China; Maximilian Sommer of the University of Cambridge; and Grant Kennedy of the University of Warwick in the UK. The work was supported by NASA (NAS5-26555, GO-HST-17139).
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December 23, 2025