Reading and writing fill in the blanks
A dramatic glimpse of the aftermath of a collision between two exoplanets is giving scientists a view at what can happen when planets into each other. A similar event in our own solar system may have formed our Moon. Known as BD +20 307, this double-star system is more than 300 light years from Earth with stars that are at least one billion years old. Yet this mature system has shown signs of swirling dusty debris that is not cold, as would be expected around stars of this age. Rather, the debris is warm, that it was made relatively recently by the impact of two planet-sized bodies. A decade ago, observations of this system by ground observatories and NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope gave the first - of this collision when the warm debris was first found. Now the Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy, SOFIA, the infrared brightness from the debris has increased by more than 10% – a sign that there is now even more warm dust.