Monty
March 15, 2026, 12:59am
1
2 planets collide 11,000 light-years from Earth in rare sight
Two planets crashed into one another in a violent, chaotic collision that astronomers recently witnessed 11,000 light-years away from Earth.
The rare cosmic event is not one scientists get to see every day.
But thanks to a bit of serendipity, a researcher at the University of Washington looking through old telescope data happened upon the bread crumbs that would lead him to the stunning discovery. A distant star located at a distance equal to nearly halfway from Earth to the galactic center of the Milky Way was displaying short dips in brightness before apparent chaos erupted.
"Right around 2021, it went completely bonkers,” study lead author Anastasios Tzanidakis , a researcher at the University of Washington, said in a statement . “I can’t emphasize enough that stars like our sun don’t do that. So when we saw this one, we were like ‘Hello, what’s going on here?’”
The phenomenon, which researchers claimed had never before been observed, led them to conclude that what they were seeing was evidence of a planetary collision, according to a study published March 11 in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.
Smapti
March 15, 2026, 1:07am
2
Reporting the OP for an incorrect thread title when it should clearly say “11 thousand and five” years ago.
Kinda scary to see breaking news that is not really news or breaking. Just sayin’
Did not read the OP, just the title.
Monty:
The fronts hardly ever fall off of planets.
And @Beckdawrek , if two planets colliding isn’t “breaking” enough for you, I don’t know what to tell ya.
Monty
March 15, 2026, 3:45am
5
That pun was, shall we say, out of the world.
Odesio
March 15, 2026, 4:35am
6
This is most definitely breaking news. Two planets are broken.
Edit: Dammit. Someone else ninjad my joke.
Max_S
March 15, 2026, 4:53am
7
I’ll give Yahoo! News credit for linking to a press release, eventually.
Here’s the actual paper (open access):
Gaia-GIC-1: An Evolving Catastrophic Planetesimal Collision Candidate, Tzanidakis, Anastasios, Davenport, James R. A.
~Max
I’m gonna have to read the article Stars exhibiting short dips in brightness are typically Eclipsing Binary Stars , in which one star is noticeably brighter than the other, and we are very nearly in the orbital plane. The classic example (and first to be historically observed, although I’ve argued that it was known to the ancient astronomers) is Algol , AKA Beta Orionis. They’re rare, but not exceedingly so – there are plenty of them in the sky. And just because the brightness varies in this way doesn’t presage collision. There must have been more to the story.
Algol /ˈælɡɒl/, designated Beta Persei (β Persei, abbreviated Beta Per, β Per), known colloquially as the Demon Star, is a bright multiple star in the constellation of Perseus and one of the first non-nova variable stars to be discovered.
Algol is a three-star system, consisting of Beta Persei Aa1, Aa2, and Ab – in which the hot luminous primary β Persei Aa1 and the larger, but cooler and fainter, β Persei Aa2 regularly pass in front of each other, causing eclipses. Thus Algol's magnitude is ...
As I’m reading it, until five years ago, the star showed periodic dimming, across the spectrum, consistent with eclipsing by a planet (this is a common method by which planets are detected). But then, from five years ago to the present, it instead shows a pattern consistent with an orbiting cloud of small hot debris (less sharp, more infrared, and other clues).
Gee, I hope nobody was living there.
Or at least, if someone was living there, they managed to send a baby in a spaceship to a planet of another star, preferably a yellow one.
Max_S
March 17, 2026, 2:03am
13
Careful, we might get Brandon Breyer instead.
~Max
