Ameteur astronomer help to discover Colliding Planets

 

In autumn, an international team of scientists successfully recorded the results of a collision between two icy exoplanets orbiting the Sun-like star ASASSN-21qj. The dust cloud formed from  celestial debris and eventually moved  between the star and Earth. It was recently revealed that amateur astronomers helped experts make this discovery. Experts were the first to notice the  strange behavior of the star. It first became twice as bright in the infrared region, then gradually began to fade.  The story begins in 2021, when the ASAS-SN telescope array first detected that a Sun-like star 1,800 light-years from Earth was rapidly changing to visible light. About 30 days later,  astronomer Artu Sainio saw a conversation on social media between two professional astronomers, Dr. Artu Sainio. Matthew Kenworthy and Dr. Eric Mamajek, who hypothesize the cause of this strange occurrence. Intrigued, Sainio decided to take a closer look at the star named ASASSN-21qj,

After studying archived data from NASA's NEOWISE program, the amateur astronomer discovered that the star showed a sudden  brightness in infrared light two years before it disappeared in visible light. So he joined the conversation on social media and shared his findings with two experts. "Amateur astronomer Arttu Sainio claimed on social media that the star lit up in the infrared more than a thousand days before  optical dimming. "That's when I realized it was an unusual case," Kenworthy said.   Sainio is now one of the authors of a new article published in the journal Nature. Professional and amateur astronomers prove in scientific articles that the rise and fall of the star ASASSN-21qj is due to the collision of two ice giant planets weighing dozens of Earths. I could collect. According to their calculations, the exoplanet hit the star at a distance of 2-16 AU. This event produced  infrared radiation, and three years later the debris cloud  at the explosion site grew and moved  between ASASSN-21qj and Earth, increasing the  brightness of the star in the visible wavelength. It was dark. Additional observations helped determine the star's properties. Amateur spectroscopist Hamish Barker attempted to capture the spectrum of ASASSN-21qj in late July 2022 to determine its temperature. But the star was so faint that Barker asked French amateur astronomer Olivier Gardet to add ASASSN-21q to his list of targets. A team called the Southern Spectroscopy Project Observatory Team was able to collect the necessary spectra and send them to Kenworthy in early September 2022.

In addition, two other amateur astronomers observed the star and participated in the study. Amateur spectroscopist Sean Currie provided a spectrum of ASASSN-21qj in early April 2023, and Franz Josef Hambusch observed the star from the ROAD Observatory in the Atacama Desert and submitted his results via the AAVSO database. reported In the coming years, the dust cloud  formed at the collision point of the two exoplanets will begin to evaporate in orbit. Scientists hope this will allow them to study the  aftermath of the explosion using ground-based telescopes or the James Webb Space Telescope. During this time, they could observe the thermal afterglow.