An international group of astronomers discovered an unusual gas cloud in a neighboring planetary system located in 95 light years from the ground. It turned out that this is evidence of a gigantic collision of two planets. Approximately the same catastrophe occurred in the solar system, which led to the appearance of the moon. This is reported in an article published in the Nature magazine.
Scientists have determined that the collision occurred about 200 thousand years ago between the planet of the earthly type and the smaller space of the space object at the speed of ten kilometers per second. A strong blow traveled part of the planet’s atmosphere than the traces of gas and dust around the star are explained.
The star HD 172555 represented a riddle for astronomers due to the unusual composition of dust, which contained a large number of unusual minerals. Their sizes were less than expected from a typical star garbage disk. In the new work, scientists estimated the number of carbon monoxide (carbon monoxide), analyzing the data collected by Alma Radio Telececopes (Atacama Large Millimeter Array) in Chile. It turned out that the amount of carbon monoxide was 20 percent of its quantity in the atmosphere of Venus. At the same time, he was relatively close to the star, at a distance of ten astronomical units, which is ten times the distance from the Sun to the Earth.
Carbon monoxide is vulnerable to photodissociation, when the star light destroys the molecule, so there is usually very little carbon monoxide from the star. Scientists quickly excluded the scenario in which the gas was formed from the substance remaining during the formation of HD 172555. It was also unlikely that the source of gas became a set of ice comets. Therefore, researchers stopped at the option that carbon monoxide came from the planet’s atmosphere.