Unseen planets may be smashing comets together around a nearby star. Astronomers have found a massive blob of carbon monoxide floating around the star Beta Pictoris, 51 light-years from Earth. The gas, most likely released from comet collisions, may help reveal the chemical makeup of other solar systems and find hidden worlds.
Beta Pictoris is already a star of firsts. Thirty years ago, it gave astronomers their first picture of a debris disk around a young star. More recently, Beta Pictoris became one of the first stars around which a planet was directly seen (SN Online: 6/10/10). And now it’s the first star to expose the insides of exocomets.