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Scientists think the early solar system 
was a chaotic place, with planetesimals,  

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asteroids, and comets colliding and bombarding 
Earth, the Moon, and other inner planets.

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Now, NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has captured 
something similar happening in another planetary  

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system around the star Fomalhaut.
Astronomers spotted a new point of  

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light in an exoplanetary system that 
wasn’t there in earlier Hubble images.  

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This new observation suggests a violent collision 
between two large objects, creating a massive  

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debris cloud, something we don’t see in our solar 
system today, but was likely in its past.

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Fomalhaut, located just 25 light-years from 
Earth, is one of the brightest stars in the night  

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sky. It’s larger and brighter than the Sun and 
surrounded by several rings of dusty debris.

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In 2008, Hubble detected what seemed to 
be an exoplanet, Fomalhaut b, the first  

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discovered in visible light. However, it faded 
over time leading scientists to conclude that it  

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was a dust cloud from colliding planetesimals. 
While searching for it in recent Hubble images,  

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they found another unexpected point of light 
in a similar spot. They named the original  

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object “cs1” and the new one “cs2.”
Collisions like these play a key role  

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in shaping planetary systems, but they’re 
rare and hard to study. This discovery gives  

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astronomers a unique chance to estimate 
both the size and number of colliding  

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objects in Fomalhaut’s debris disk, something 
that’s nearly impossible to do otherwise.

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They estimate the objects that formed cs1 and 
cs2 were about 18 miles,  

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with roughly 300 million similar 
bodies orbiting in the system.

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Using Hubble, astronomers will monitor cs2 over the

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next three years to see if it fades or brightens.  

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The team also hopes to use NASA’s James Webb Space 
Telescope to extend their observations into longer  

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infrared wavelengths of light, complementing the 
visible wavelengths of their Hubble data. 

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Multi-spectral observations of the Fomalhaut 
system would provide a more complete picture  

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of its rapid evolution, giving astronomers a rare 
opportunity to study how colliding planetesimals  

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behave while revealing insights into their 
composition and formation. This research  

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also offers hints of what our own solar system 
was like billions of years ago.

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