What looked like a planet was actually a massive space collision

Astronomers discovered that what appeared to be a planet orbiting the young star Fomalhaut was actually debris from massive space collisions between planetesimals at least 60 kilometers wide. Two such enormous impacts occurred within just 20 years around this 440-million-year-old star, creating dust clouds that temporarily glowed like planets before disappearing. These observations suggest that catastrophic collisions during planet formation may be far more common than previously thought, occurring perhaps thousands of times more frequently than the once-per-100,000-years estimate.