I don't understand the use of "ruined" in the NYT headline. I guess they don't understand that this is a very young star, and it's likely that our own sun had similar rings before they coalesced into planets.
>The intermediate belt is also where exoplanet hunters once thought they had seen a world they named Fomalhaut b. But in 2020, Dr. Gaspar and his colleagues proposed that what other scientists had once thought was an intact exoplanet was actually an expanding cloud of debris created by an epic collision.
A problem with this idea was that this part of space looked vacant, so it seemed unlikely that two objects had managed to crash into each other. The team’s discovery of the intermediate debris belt has now proffered a solution.
“We now know there’s stuff there,” Dr. Christiansen of the NASA archive said. “OK, so it’s a collision — we can finally put that to bed.”
Cataclysmic melees are not just transpiring close to the star. What looks like a vast maelstrom of dust within the outer belt may be the ghost of another gargantuan impact.
“That’s just cool,” Dr. Christensen said. “What is it? It’s very tantalizing.”
