Artist's concept of a celestial body colliding into a planet sized body.
This artist's concept shows a celestial body about the size of our moon slamming at great speed into a body the size of Mercury. NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope found evidence that a high-speed collision of this sort occurred a few thousand years ago around a young star, called HD 172555, still in the early stages of planet formation. The star is about 100 light-years from Earth. As the bodies slammed into each other, a huge flash of light would have been emitted. Rocky surfaces were vaporized and melted, and hot matter was sprayed everywhere.
Size: 4744px × 3795px
Photo credit: © Stocktrek Images / Alamy / Afripics
License: Royalty Free
Model Released: No
Keywords: 172555, apocalypse, celestial, colliding, collision, color, concept, digitally, explosion, fiery, generated, hd, horizontal, illustration, image, objects, people, planets, rendering, rendition, smashing, space, stars, universe
