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NASA's Hubble Sees Asteroids Colliding at Nearby Star for First Time

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December 18, 2025 2:00PM (EST)Release ID: 2025-008
A dark circle shows where a star's light has been blocked. Grainy orange lines extend radially outward in all directions. Swooping orange arcs are at upper left and lower right.

Summary

The spectacular, resulting dust cloud mimics the appearance of a planet.

First you don’t see it, now you do! While Hubble astronomers were repeatedly viewing the nearby star Fomalhaut and its planetary system, they suddenly saw a point of light appear out of nowhere. This object did not show up in any of their previous observations. The scientists quickly realized that Hubble had captured the violent collision of two massive objects, an extraordinary event unlike anything in our own present-day solar system. The huge debris cloud created by this impact looked like a newly found exoplanet.

Full Article

Like a game of cosmic bumper cars, scientists think the early days of our solar system were a time of violent turmoil, with planetesimals, asteroids, and comets smashing together and pelting the Earth, Moon and the other inner planets with debris. Now, in a historical milestone, NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has directly imaged similar catastrophic collisions in a nearby planetary system around another star, Fomalhaut. “This is certainly the first time I’ve ever seen a point of light appear out of nowhere in an exoplanetary system,” said principal investigator Paul Kalas ...

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News releases highlighting the discoveries of NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope are produced for NASA by the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Baltimore, Maryland, under NASA Contract NAS5-26555. News release content is developed by the News Team in STScI’s Office of Public Outreach.

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