Illustration of Collision of Protoplanetary Bodies in the Fomalhaut Star System

This artist's illustration depicts the collision of two 125-mile-wide icy, dusty bodies orbiting the bright star Fomalhaut, located 25 light-years away. Astronomers believe that Hubble Space Telescope observations, spanning several years, provide observational evidence for the first-ever detection of such a titanic collision in another star system. What was first thought to be a planet orbiting Fomalhaut eventually faded and disappeared from view in the Hubble snapshots. The interpretation is that the object wasn't a planet at all, but an expanding cloud of dust from a collision between two equally massive bodies. Ballooning to over 200 million miles across, the cloud is now so diffuse it has fallen below Hubble's detection limit. Smashups like this are estimated to happen around Fomalhaut once every 200,000 years. Therefore, Hubble was looking at the right place at the right time to capture this transient event.