James Webb Telescope Detects the Fingerprints of Catastrophic Planetary Collisions

Dust around distant stars may reveal whether colliding worlds grazed one another or hit hard enough to vaporize rock. Vaporizing vast amounts of solid rock, a Mars-sized world called Theia may have slammed into the infant Earth, blasting debris into space that eventually gathered into the Moon. Astronomers searching for similar collisions around distant stars [...]