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Published August 29, 2014 | Supplemental Material + Submitted
Journal Article Open

Large impacts around a solar-analog star in the era of terrestrial planet formation

Abstract

The final assembly of terrestrial planets occurs via massive collisions, which can launch copious clouds of dust that are warmed by the star and glow in the infrared. We report the real-time detection of a debris-producing impact in the terrestrial planet zone around a 35-million-year-old solar-analog star. We observed a substantial brightening of the debris disk at a wavelength of 3 to 5 micrometers, followed by a decay over a year, with quasi-periodic modulations of the disk flux. The behavior is consistent with the occurrence of a violent impact that produced vapor out of which a thick cloud of silicate spherules condensed that were then ground into dust by collisions. These results demonstrate how the time domain can become a new dimension for the study of terrestrial planet formation.

Additional Information

© 2014 American Association for the Advancement of Science. 23 April 2014; accepted 15 July 2014. H.Y.A.M, K.Y.L.S., and G.H.R. thank R. Malhotra and A. Gáspár for valuable discussions. This work is based on observations made with the Spitzer Space Telescope, which is operated by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), California Institute of Technology, under a contract with NASA. Support for this work was provided by NASA through an award issued by JPL/Caltech and by NASA grant NNX13AE74G. All data are publicly available through the NASA/IPAC Infrared Science Archive.

Attached Files

Submitted - 1503.05609.pdf

Supplemental Material - Meng.SM.pdf

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