'Completely bonkers': Astronomers find evidence of a cataclysmic collision between exoplanets

Astronomers have collected evidence of a violent collision between two planets in a distant star system. The first clues of this cataclysmic event came when a rather boring star began behaving very oddly. The collision seems to resemble the event in our history in which a planetary body slammed into Earth and created the moon.

The star in question is Gaia20ehk, an ordinarily stable main-sequence star like the sun located around 11,000 light-years away with a steady and predictable light output. Until 2016, that is, when something very strange started to happen.

The star's light output was nice and flat, but starting in 2016, it had these three dips in brightness. And then, right around 2021, it went completely bonkers," team leader and University of Washington researcher Anastasios Tzanidakis said in a statement. "I can't emphasize enough that stars like our sun don't do that.