planetary science

In a solar system about 1,800 light-years from Earth, two planets smacked into one another in an impact that vaporized them both. And astronomers caught them in the act.

An incandescent blob of leftover planet, lingering after an impact, could explain a surge of infrared light from a remote star, researchers report October 11 in Nature. And the ensuing debris field could also explain a subsequent dimming of the star, the team says. While scientists have glimpsed planetary debris in other solar systems before, no one has seen the smoldering remains of a collision between exoplanets until now (SN: 5/8/23).

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“The possible detection of a post-impact body is really exciting,” says astrophysicist Philip Carter of the University of Bristol in England, who was not involved in the new study. “As far as I’m aware, no one’s claimed this before.”

As is often the case for exciting astronomical discoveries, detecting the aftermath of this cosmic smackdown involved more than a little luck.

Astronomer Matthew Kenworthy wasn’t hunting for giant impacts. “I was looking for rings” around exoplanets, he says (SN: 2/1/15). So he was scouring telescope survey data for stars that flicker or dim in unusual ways. And when the ASAS-SN survey — an ongoing project to monitor the entire sky for exploding stars — captured the sunlike star ASASSN-21qj repeatedly dimming in visible light, “I immediately jumped on it,” says Kenworthy, of Leiden Observatory in the Netherlands.

As he was analyzing the fading star, Kenworthy stumbled upon another clue — on social media. One of his posts on Twitter (now called X) about ASASSN-21qj’s unusual behavior caught the eye of citizen scientist Arttu Sainio. “I tweeted out saying: ‘Oh, this is amazing, this star is fading!’” Kenworthy says. “Then he said: ‘Oh, by the way, did you realize the star had brightened up [in infrared]?’”

Sainio pointed out that infrared data from NASA’s orbiting WISE telescope showed a strong uptick in infrared radiation from the star about 900 days before the dimming started. Kenworthy’s hopes for rings were dashed. But maybe he and his colleagues had found something else just as fascinating.

“It just totally changed the story,” Kenworthy says.

The researchers realized that a giant impact could neatly tie together the spontaneous infrared glow and the visible light dimming that followed more than two years later. Their calculations suggest that two Neptune-sized planets collided, vaporizing each other and forming a hot, donut-shaped body of vaporized rock — the source of the infrared glow. ASASSN-21qj later dimmed when impact debris smeared out around the star and blocked some of its light.

[embedded content]
Two exoplanets collided in a smashup that left behind a glob of hot, vaporized rock and a debris cloud. Astronomers first observed the afterglow of the collision in infrared light. Then, 900 days later, they saw the pulverized planets’ star dim as impact debris drifted in front of it, between the star and Earth.

Alternatively, it’s possible that astronomers observed two separate events: an infrared glow from dust warmed by starlight, perhaps left behind by a collision between close-orbiting protoplanets, followed by dimming as a big disk of unrelated material passed in front of the star. But two rare events happening in close succession is “really, really, really unlikely,” Kenworthy says.

The putative post-impact blob could one day coalesce into a planet. And as the remaining debris shears out into a disk orbiting the star, it too might eventually collect onto the new planet or form moons around it.

How long all that might take isn’t clear, Carter says. It could happen within a few years or perhaps several thousand. “The models of these impact remnants are still in the very early stages,” he says. Either way, continuing to observe the post-impact material over the coming years will give scientists a rare chance to witness, not just simulate, what happens after a planetary collision.

“You expect astronomical processes to take astronomical amounts of time. And it’s like: Nope! This was very fast. This happened over just a few years,” Kenworthy says. “It’ll just be fascinating to see how it evolves over time, in the next 10 or 20 years.” More

Meteorites offer tantalizing clues about what the early solar system was like. But finding them is far from rocket science. Often, researchers simply fan out across a landscape and walk for hours while staring at the ground. Now, some scientists are turning to drones and machine learning to help spot freshly fallen meteorites much more efficiently.

A team of six people on a meteorite-hunting expedition can search about 200,000 square meters per day, says Seamus Anderson, a planetary scientist at Curtin University in Perth, Australia. But since the area over which a cluster of meteorites falls typically can’t be pinpointed to better than a few million square meters, searching can take a while, he says. “It’s quite slow.”

Seamus Anderson (pictured) and his colleagues used a drone to find a meteorite in Western Australia in 2021.The Desert Fireball Network

Around 2016, Anderson began toying with the concept of using drones to take pictures of the ground to look for meteorites. That idea blossomed into a Ph.D. project. In 2022, he and his colleagues reported their first successful recovery of a meteorite spotted with a drone. They’ve since found four more meteorites at a different site, the team reported August 17 in Los Angeles at a meeting of the Meteoritical Society.

Drone-based searches are much faster than the standard way of doing things, Anderson says. “You’re going from about 300 days of human effort down to about a dozen or so.” It’s also fun and exciting work, he says, but there are challenges too.

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Anderson and his collaborators have used drones to search for meteorites in remote parts of Western Australia and South Australia. The team is tipped off about a fall site by networks of ground-based cameras that track meteoroids flashing through Earth’s atmosphere. Then, the hunt is on.

The researchers pack a four-wheel drive vehicle with drone and computer equipment, battery charging stations, generators, fuel, food, camping equipment, tables, chairs and more. The drive to the fall site can take more than a day, often on rough or nonexistent roads, Anderson says. “You hope you don’t pop a tire.”

After arriving, the team flies its primary drone at an altitude of about 20 meters. Its camera takes an image of the ground once every second, and the researchers download the data every 40 minutes or so when the drone lands to receive fresh batteries.

A typical day of flying can net over 10,000 images, which are then divided digitally into 100 million or so smaller sections. Those “tiles,” each 2 meters on a side, are fed into a machine learning algorithm that has been trained to recognize meteorites based on images of the real thing or terrestrial rocks spray-painted black. The latter are convincing stand-ins for real meteorites, Anderson says.

The algorithm is good but not perfect. It automatically discards most tiles — typically upwards of 99 percent — that don’t contain any meteorite-looking objects. But that still leaves roughly 50,000 or so tiles after a day’s worth of flights that must be manually checked by a human, Anderson says.

A machine learning algorithm, trained to identify potential meteorites in drone images, can mistake sleeping kangaroos (indicated with yellow squares) for space rocks. Researchers are working on improving the algorithm further.The Desert Fireball Network

Most of the time, those tiles contain things that decidedly aren’t meteorites: animal poop, tin cans, snakes or sleeping kangaroos, for instance. Those objects get flagged as potential meteorites simply because the algorithm isn’t familiar with them, Anderson says, and it’s up to the team to winnow out those false positives.

For objects that still look convincing to the human eye, the researchers send out a smaller drone that flies much lower — about a meter off the ground — to investigate. Finally, the team goes out in person to examine promising candidates.

The researchers plan to train their algorithm to better avoid flagging things like poop and kangaroos as meteorites. And the team is working on making its computer code open-source so that other researchers can freely use it.

Anderson also hopes to see drones make an appearance in Antarctica, a hotbed of meteorite sleuthing (SN: 1/26/22). But the icy environment will present a whole new slew of challenges, Anderson says, such as making sure sensitive electronic equipment fares well in the frigid conditions and overcoming the logistics of working in such a remote place. “Antarctica is a whole different beast.” More

Occasional flashes light up Venus’ shroud of clouds. Previous analyses have hinted that the bursts of light could be lightning in the hellish world’s atmosphere. But a new study suggests most of the flashes may be nothing more than the brief yet brilliant blazes of meteors.

With upcoming missions planned for Venus, scientists are eager to figure out the light’s origin (SN: 6/2/21). If the flashes are lightning, the electrical phenomenon could pose risks to future probes dropping through the Venusian atmosphere or carried by balloons for extended periods in the planet’s clouds, says Claire Blaske, a planetary scientist now at Stanford University. Small meteors that burn up in the atmosphere, however, wouldn’t pose much of a danger.

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Previous landers on Venus have often detected electromagnetic static similar to the type picked up on AM radio and caused by lightning during thunderstorms on Earth, Blaske says. And orbiters and Earth-based telescopes have discerned brief, bright flashes in the atmosphere.

But the static and optical flashes have never been detected simultaneously, Blaske says. And, notes Paul Byrne, a planetary scientist at Washington University in St. Louis who was not involved in the study, “it’s not clear there is the potential for lightning on Venus” given how little is known about the dynamics of its atmosphere.

Blaske, then at Arizona State University in Tempe, and her colleagues wondered whether meteors could be masquerading as lightning on Venus. Two surveys counted the flashes of light: one by a telescope on Arizona’s Mount Bigelow and one by instruments aboard Japan’s Akatsuki orbiter (SN: 12/8/15).

Given that data, there are probably between 10,000 and 100,000 of these flashes each year, the researchers report in the September Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets.

That may seem like too many flashes to all be caused by meteors. After all, Venus is a slightly smaller cosmic target than Earth. But meteors there will be substantially brighter — and thus more noticeable — because they are traveling faster on average: The space rocks zip through Venus’ atmosphere at about 25 kilometers per second, compared with 20.3 kilometers per second for meteoroids entering Earth’s atmosphere. In part, that’s because Venus is traveling around the sun faster than Earth is.

Overall, these factors and others led Blaske and her colleagues to conclude that meteors could be numerous enough to account for most, if not all, of the flashes expected to occur in Venus’ atmosphere.

The team’s analysis “is convincing and does a nice job of establishing a plausible explanation for these flashes,” Byrne says. Future observations that simultaneously measure the flashes and electromagnetic static on Venus could help resolve the mystery. But other big questions remain. For example, it’s unknown whether Venus might experience a form of lightning, or other type of electrical discharge, in its carbon dioxide–rich atmosphere that isn’t accompanied by flashes of light but could still pose a risk to probes. More

When a probe smashed into a small asteroid last year, the collision did more than change the asteroid’s orbit — it blasted a few dozen hefty boulders into space too.

Last September, NASA steered the DART spacecraft into Dimorphos, a moonlet of the larger asteroid Didymos, to test a strategy for knocking any future Earth-bound asteroids off course (SN: 10/11/22). About three months after the impact, the Hubble Space Telescope spied a halo of 37 previously unseen objects accompanying the space rock duo in their orbit around the sun, researchers report in the July 21 Astrophysical Journal Letters.

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The boulders probably aren’t bits that were pulverized from larger rocks during the impact. Instead, simulations suggest they were likely intact when they were blasted off Dimorphos and could have been launched off the moonlet’s rubble-covered surface by the energy of either the collision or the seismic waves bouncing around inside it in the wake of the impact.

Still, “there’s a lot of uncertainty in such simulations,” planetary astronomer David Jewitt of the University of California, Los Angeles.

The last complete image from NASA’s DART spacecraft shows Dimorphos’ rubble-strewn surface just two seconds before the probe smashed into the asteroid.NASA, APL

Based on the brightness of the new objects, some of the dimmest ever spied by Hubble in our solar system, Jewitt and colleagues estimate that these boulders may be as wide as 7 meters. At least 15 are larger than 4 meters across. Together, the researchers calculate, the boulders probably weigh just over 5 million kilograms — roughly the weight of 300 dump truck loads of gravel.

Repeated observations by Hubble reveal that, on average, the boulders are drifting away from Dimorphos and Didymos at about 1 kilometer per hour — a little faster than the escape velocity for the double asteroid system. So, Jewitt says, the boulders, as well as a presumed multitude of rocks too small and dim for Hubble to see, will eventually break away from the asteroid system’s orbit and circle the sun on their own. More

Watch out Yosemite — the moon has its own impressive rock display.

An enormous chunk of granite, measuring roughly 50 kilometers wide, may be buried beneath the lunar surface, researchers reported July 5 in Nature. Finding such a behemoth, by far the largest granite structure spotted beyond Earth, is a surprise given that forming this type of rock typically requires plate tectonics or abundant water.

When Apollo astronauts landed on the moon in the 1960s and 1970s, they encountered vistas dominated by basalt. The igneous rock is run-of-the-mill stuff on both the moon and our planet, says Matthew Siegler, a planetary scientist at the Planetary Science Institute in Tucson. “Everything starts as basalt.”

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But over time, with enough heat and pressure, basalt can melt and morph into more durable granite. Plate tectonics and water, both mainstays on Earth, often help facilitate that transformation: Tectonic forces can help drag rocks down deep, where it’s hotter, and water, acting like a salt, helps rocks melt at lower temperatures (SN: 1/13/21).

Because the moon has no plate tectonics and very little water, finding copious amounts of granite there would be unexpected, Siegler says. Indeed, out of the roughly 380 kilograms of moon rocks (about the heft of a large bear) brought back to Earth by Apollo astronauts, just a handful of millimeter-sized pieces are granite (SN: 7/15/19). “That’s our whole inventory,” Siegler says.

But Siegler and his colleagues now have strong evidence that a massive piece of granite might be lurking under the moon’s surface. The team analyzed microwave data collected from the farside of the moon by China’s Chang’e-1 and Chang’e-2 lunar orbiters and discovered a geothermal hotspot roughly 9 degrees Celsius warmer than expected. Elevated temperatures are often an indicator of granite, Siegler says, because uranium and thorium — radioactive elements that decay over time and release heat — tend to aggregate within the rock.  

To estimate how large a piece of granite could be lying beneath the region, known as the Compton-Belkovich Volcanic Complex, the researchers ran computer simulations of different sizes of granite buried at different depths. The team concluded that an ellipsoidal hunk of granite roughly 50 kilometers wide and 25 kilometers tall capped by a smaller ellipsoid of granite, all buried four kilometers below the lunar surface, best explained the Chang’e-1 and Chang’e-2 observations.

The big question is how such an edifice formed. One idea that Siegler and his colleagues propose is that a mantle plume — a column of molten rock — once persisted under the Compton-Belkovich Volcanic Complex. That plume would have turned some of the region’s basalt into granite.

On Earth, mantle plumes famously combine with tectonic plate movement to create island chains like Hawaii, Siegler says (SN: 9/19/11). But on the moon, where there is no plate tectonics, a mantle plume would just continuously heat one region, he says. “You get a single spot of the crust that keeps getting roasted.”

This is an intriguing discovery that should be followed up with a lunar mission, says Brad Jolliff, a planetary scientist at Washington University in St. Louis who was not involved with the new study. “It’s ripe for a robotic mission that has a small rover that can test some of these properties up close.”

In the next few years, scientists plan to do just that. NASA’s Lunar Vulkan Imaging and Spectroscopy Explorer mission, or Lunar-VISE, which is slated to launch by 2027, will land on the summit of one of the Gruithuisen domes. Located on the moon’s nearside, these volcanic features are believed to also contain granite. Lunar-VISE will be able to take a closeup look at the region’s chemical composition, says the mission’s principal investigator Kerri Donaldson Hanna, a planetary geologist at the University of Central Florida in Orlando.

That’s important because it’s often difficult to capture small details from orbit. Landers like Lunar-VISE can shed light on the moon’s geology, says Donaldson Hanna. “We need new observations.” More

Mercury’s auroras are perfectly in character. While temperate Earth gets heavenly light shows over its poles, hellish Mercury gets invisible ribbons of X-ray radiation that cling to its sun-blasted surface.

But as alien as they may appear, Mercury’s X-ray auroras have a lot in common with Earth’s polar lights, and with auroras throughout the solar system.

Scientists have now directly shown that fluctuations in Mercury’s magnetic field can fling electrons toward the planet, where they eventually rain down and cause auroras of X-ray light. This process, called electron precipitation, now appears to be practically universal in the solar system: It causes auroras on every planet with a global magnetic field except Neptune, researchers report July 18 in Nature Communications. Even Mars, which has only localized magnetic fields, has auroras caused by raining electrons (SN: 3/19/15).

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For Mercury, “this is really the first time to detect these electrons directly,” says space plasma physicist Sae Aizawa of the University of Pisa in Italy.

Electron precipitation usually happens because of interactions between planets’ magnetic fields and the solar wind — a stream of charged particles spewed from the sun’s upper atmosphere.

Buffeted by the solar wind, the sun-facing side of a planet’s magnetic field gets squished while the night side is swept out into a long “magnetotail” that extends behind the planet. Eventually, the magnetotail stretches so much that its formerly mostly-parallel magnetic field lines snap and reconnect, sending some field lines flying off behind the planet and others back toward it.

Part of Mercury’s northern hemisphere comes into view in this picture taken by the BepiColombo probe (parts of which are visible in the foreground) during its first flyby of Mercury in 2021.BepiColombo/MTM/ESA, CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO

“The magnetic field lines sort of break and form new ones,” says space physicist Ryan Dewey of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, who was not involved in the study. “And in that process, a lot of energy is released.”

All that energy sends packets of electrons flying planetward, spiraling in corkscrew-like trajectories along magnetic field lines. When these electrons hit the planet or its atmosphere, they release energy as light.

The light’s wavelength depends on what the electrons encounter as they rain down. Earth’s auroras shine in visible wavelengths because incoming electrons excite molecules of uncharged gases in the atmosphere like oxygen and nitrogen, which release visible light when they relax back to their normal states. Mercury’s auroras shine in X-ray wavelengths because electrons decelerate as they smack the planet’s rocky surface. The lost energy is released as X-rays.

Researchers first spotted Mercurian X-ray auroras in data beamed back from the MESSENGER probe, which orbited Mercury from 2011 to 2015 (SN: 4/30/15). But while scientists reasoned that electrons must rain down on Mercury to cause its X-ray glow, MESSENGER didn’t have the right instruments to measure the precipitating particles.

The European Space Agency’s BepiColombo spacecraft does. Analyzing data from the probe’s first flyby of Mercury in 2021, Aizawa and her colleagues spotted telltale signs of the process.

One clue was that as BepiColombo flew through Mercury’s magnetosphere, it observed surges of fast-moving, high-speed electrons followed by several subsequent waves of progressively slower, lower-energy electrons. “This is exactly what we’d describe as a precipitating signature,” says Aizawa, who did the work while at the Institute of Research in Astrophysics and Planetology in Toulouse, France.

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To Dewey, the new discovery is a tantalizing sneak peek at the discoveries waiting to be made at Mercury once BepiColombo enters orbit in 2025. By then, it will have been a decade since scientists last had a probe continuously orbiting Mercury.

“To me, it’s very exciting to see just how much we can learn from even just a short pass through the magnetosphere,” he says. “It’s a glimpse.” More

On Jupiter, lightning jerks and jolts a lot like it does on Earth.

Jovian lightning emits radio wave pulses that are typically separated by about one millisecond, researchers report May 23 in Nature Communications. The energetic prestissimo, the scientists say, is a sign that the gas giant’s lightning propagates in pulses, at a pace comparable to that of the bolts that cavort through our own planet’s thunderclouds. The similarities between the two world’s electrical phenomena could have implications for the search for alien life.

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Arcs of lightning on both worlds appear to move somewhat like a winded hiker going up a mountain, pausing after each step to catch their breath, says Ivana Kolmašová, an atmospheric physicist at the Czech Academy of Sciences in Prague. “One step, another step, then another step … and so on.”

Here on Earth, lightning forms as turbulent winds within thunderclouds cause many ice crystals and water droplets to rub together, become charged and then move to opposite sides of the clouds, progressively generating static electrical charges. When the charges grow big enough to overcome the air’s ability to insulate them, electrons are released — the lightning takes its first step. From there, the surging electrons will repeatedly ionize the air and rush into it, lurching the bolt forward at an average of hundreds of thousands of meters per second.

Scientists have suggested that superbolts observed in Jovian clouds might also form by collisions between ice crystals and water droplets (SN: 8/5/20). But no one knew whether the alien bolts extended and branched in increments, as they do on Earth, or if they took some other form.

For the new study, Kolmašová and her colleagues used five years of radio wave data collected by NASA’s Juno spacecraft (SN: 12/15/22). Analyzing hundreds of thousands of radio wave snapshots, the team found radio wave emissions from Jovian lightning appeared to pulse at a rate comparable to that of Earth’s intracloud lightning — arcs of electricity that never strike ground. 

If bolts extend through Jupiter’s water clouds at a similar velocity as they do in Earth’s clouds, then Jovian lightning might branch and extend in steps that are hundreds to thousands of meters long. That’s comparable in length to the jolted strides of Earth’s intracloud lightning, the researchers say.

“That’s a perfectly reasonable explanation,” says atmospheric physicist Richard Sonnenfeld of the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology in Socorro, who wasn’t involved in the study. Alternatively, he says, the signals could be produced as pulses of electrical current propagate back and forth along tendrils of lightning that have already formed, rather than from the stop-and-go advancements of a new bolt. On Earth, such currents cause some bolts to appear to flicker.

But stop and go seems like a sound interpretation, says atmospheric physicist Yoav Yair of Reichman University in Herzliya, Israel. Kolmašová and her colleagues “show that if you’re discharging a cloud … the physics remains basically the same [on Jupiter as on Earth], and the current will behave the same.”

If that universality is real, it could have implications for the search for life elsewhere. Experiments have shown that lightning strikes on Earth could have smelted some of the chemical ingredients needed to form the building blocks of life (SN: 3/16/21). If lightning is discharging in a similar way on alien worlds, Yair says, then it could be producing similar ingredients in those places too. More

Saturn’s rings might have formed while trilobites scuttled about on Earth. Space dust has been accumulating on the icy halos for no more than 400 million years, researchers report in the May 12 Science Advances.

The 4.5-billion-year-old planet appears to have acquired its iconic ornamentation relatively recently, says physicist Sascha Kempf of the University of Colorado Boulder. “We’re quite lucky to see a ring in the first place.”

The rings of Saturn are made of countless icy particles, which become covered with dust as tiny meteoroids strike them. These dustings darken the rings’ complexion, like mud sullies snow on roads in winter.

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This cosmic staining was key to the new analysis, as was the now-defunct Cassini spacecraft’s Cosmic Dust Analyzer. From 2004 to 2017, the instrument caught dust-sized micrometeoroids moving around Saturn, measuring their velocity, mass, charge and composition.

Kempf and colleagues identified about 160 particles — out of millions — that could have hailed from beyond the Saturn system. The researchers estimated the rate at which the incoming dust accumulates on Saturn’s rings, and calculated how long it would have taken to darken the rings to their observed color. The planet’s hoops might have materialized more than 100 million years after trilobites — mysterious, extinct invertebrates — appeared on Earth, the team found (SN: 8/30/19).

The age of the rings has been debated for decades (SN: 10/20/16). Even after the new study, there’s still disagreement.

If the rings are somehow losing dust over time, they could be ancient, says planetary scientist Aurélien Crida of Université Côte d’Azur in Nice, France, who was not involved in the study. “Possibly as old as Saturn.”

It seems clear that the rings have been exposed to micrometeoroid impacts for at least a hundred million years, Crida says. But simulations of the rings’ formation from the gravitational shredding of an early moon suggest their size is consistent with an age of billions of years, he says. And researchers have reported silicate grains falling from the rings into Saturn’s atmosphere (SN: 10/4/18). Some unidentified process might be cleaning the rings of the micrometeoroid dust, making them appear younger than they are, Crida says.

Alternatively, the previously reported falling dust might come from meteoroid impacts that shatter ring ice, Kempf says.

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Experiments that smash micrometeoroids into ice particles could help resolve the discrepancy, Crida says. For now, the debate over the age of the rings lives on. More