“It’s incredible that various telescopes caught this impact in real time,” says astronomer Anastasios Tzanidakis<\/a> of the University of Washington.<\/p>\n “There are only a few other planetary collisions of any kind on record, and none that bear so many similarities to the impact that created the Earth and Moon. If we can observe more moments like this elsewhere in the galaxy, it will teach us lots about the formation of our world.”<\/p>\n Planetary systems, particularly in their nascent years, can be extremely chaotic environments<\/a>. Clumps of dust grow into the seeds of planets \u2013 planetesimals \u2013 wherever conditions such as density and gravity allow, regardless of what else is flying around the young star.<\/p>\n This can lead to frequent collisions, as scientists believe happened in our own Solar System. In addition to later eras of heavy bombardment, when countless asteroids struck the young planets, something the size of Mars<\/a> is thought to have collided with Earth<\/a>, spraying debris into orbit that went on to form the Moon<\/a>.<\/p>\n Evidence of this process occurring around other stars is difficult to come by. Planetary collisions happen on relatively small scales and unfold quickly, leaving behind only short-lived (in the scheme of the Universe) clouds of dust that are hard to detect from across the galaxy.<\/p>\n However, with recent large-scale surveys such as Gaia<\/a>, astronomers are now monitoring huge swaths of the sky at once, repeatedly measuring the brightness, colors, and positions of enormous numbers of stars to catch any changes in their behavior.<\/p>\n For Gaia-GIC-1, changes were first recorded nearly a decade ago. It wasn’t until Tzanidakis was sifting through older data that he noticed something odd.<\/p>\n “The star’s light output was nice and flat, but starting in 2016, it had these three dips in brightness. And then, right around 2021, it went completely bonkers,” he explains.<\/a><\/p>\n “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?'”<\/p>\n Gaia-GIC-1 is an F-type star, a bit like the Sun, but larger and hotter. It’s about 1.7 times the Sun’s radius and about 1.3 times its mass, hanging out near the southern constellation of Puppis<\/a>, in the outer regions of the Milky Way’s disk.<\/p>\n Its precise age eludes measurement, but it looks relatively stable, sitting solidly on the main sequence. That means it has entered stellar adulthood, powered by hydrogen fusion in its core. F-type stars<\/a> are pretty stolid \u2013 they’re not characterized by the wild activity seen in red dwarf stars<\/a>, for example, nor do they exhibit the strange fluctuations<\/a> seen in stars at the end of their lifespans, like Betelgeuse<\/a>.<\/p>\n So it was somewhat puzzling to see such stark changes in brightness in Gaia-GIC-1, whose light ultimately dimmed by as much as a whopping 25 percent, in a pattern that had never been observed before.<\/p>\n Astronomer James Davenport of the University of Washington suggested looking at the star in a different light \u2013 and that’s where the plot started to thicken.<\/p>\n “The infrared light curve was the complete opposite of the visible light,” Tzanidakis says<\/a>.<\/p>\n “As the visible light began to flicker and dim, the infrared light spiked. Which could mean that the material blocking the star is hot \u2013 so hot that it’s glowing in the infrared.”<\/p>\n The observation suggested a cloud of dust with a mass comparable to a large asteroid<\/a>, approaching half the mass of the dwarf planet Ceres<\/a>, heated to around 900 kelvins. According to the researchers’ modeling, there’s one type of event that can fit all those parameters.<\/p>\n A collision between planetesimals can produce the observed mass and heat, and even match the odd brightness fluctuations, including the initial dimming and the later chaos. If two planetesimals are veering closer and closer to each other, they could undergo a series of grazing impacts before the final messy collision.<\/p>\n That collision, the researchers found, would have taken place at a distance of about one astronomical unit from the host star \u2013 about the same as the distance between Earth and the Sun. This could make it a vital clue about the formative years of our own Solar System, our home world, and even life upon it.<\/p>\n Related: Our Moon Is Curiously Lopsided, And a Massive Impact Could Be to Blame<\/a><\/p>\n “How rare is the event that created the Earth and Moon? That question is fundamental to astrobiology,” Davenport says<\/a>.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/bonkers-star.jpg\")
Some of the observations of Gaia-GIC-1, showcasing its crazy behavior. (Tzanidakis & Davenport, ApJL<\/a>, 2026)<\/p>\n![\"YouTube](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/1757390949_851_0.jpg\")
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