Astronomers probably make good detectives. They examine cosmic events with such small deviations in the data that you are surprised. The new discovery of “Webb” is one of them; This space telescope helped detect collision signatures of asteroids in the star system. This is impossible to take into account even in our system, not to mention tens of light-years away.

The discovery was made in the Beta Pictoris system, 63.4 light-years away from the Solar System. This is a young system with a stellar age of about 20 million years. As befits a young star, it is surrounded by a proto-planetary disk of dust, rock, comets and asteroids. In other words, planets form around the star. It is important for us to know how this happens and what the patterns are. Will the answers to these questions help us understand how unique and ordinary the solar system, the Earth, and indeed humanity are?

About 20 years ago, Painter Beta was observed by the Spitzer telescope. Scientists decided to check the data obtained with Webb’s help. The more sensitive “Webb” could not see the dust accumulations in the system previously discovered by “Spitzer”. After analyzing the data, scientists concluded that the dust was blown away by the star’s light, which means it was quite fine, like powdered sugar. And there were so many; It is 100,000 times more massive than the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs on Earth.

According to Spitzer and Webb data, a collision of huge rock masses similar to Earth occurred in the Beta Painter system about 20 years ago. This led to the destruction of the asteroids and ejection of a fine cloud of heated silicate dust. “Spitzer” saw this region, but at that time it was impossible to draw conclusions about it – nothing like this can be seen in the protoplanetary disk.

The scientists who sent Webb there could no longer find a heated region of known scale and mass. It fell apart within 20 years, and this could only happen in one case; It was the lightest dust cloud ever to appear after an asteroid impact. The absence of a trace of a “crime” as well as its presence tells the story of the incident. And if “Webb” did not see anything, this would also be a revelation. Possibly the first of its kind, such as an asteroid collision in a nearby star system.