Do you know what those extreme avalanche slides are? Even the Hungarian astronomers studied this.

The extreme impact craters are rare systems where celestial bodies the size of the Moon and Mars collide, creating a vast amount of hot plasma. The results of the largest such surveys ever conducted provide new insights into the formation of planets, including the early history of our Solar System – readable in the Friday announcement of the Astronomical and Earth Science Research Center. The extreme impact craters represent a rare but more spectacular stage in the evolutionary process of the circumstellar disks. A group led by Kate Su, a researcher at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colorado, examined 21 such systems. Based on the research results, it was determined that these systems can be sorted into two main types: collisions of high-energy objects between Mars-sized bodies in silicon dioxide-rich disks, while collisions of lunar-sized objects can occur in silicon dioxide-poor systems. These occur around stars younger than 300 million years, coinciding with the presumed period of protoplanetary disk formation. The medium-infrared spectrometer of the James Webb telescope played a key role in the discovery. Using the instrument, the researchers were also able to show the presence of tiny dust particles whose size and composition reveal what type of collision created them, although the planetary rings involved in the collision cannot be studied directly in the same way. The results published in the scientific journal The Astrophysical Journal shed light on the early history of the Solar System as well. The silicon dioxide-rich disks are consistent with the estimates that the Moon and the young Earth were born from the collision of a Mars-sized body and the young Earth, approximately 100 million years after the formation of the Solar System. The older, silicon dioxide-poor disks support the hypothesis of late intense bombardment, during which the gravitational effect of gas giants disturbed the orbits of smaller bodies, causing catastrophic collisions. Therefore, the work on extreme impact craters helps to assemble a comprehensive picture of how the Solar System evolved – Moór Attila, the chief researcher at HUN-REN CSFK, points out. If you want to know similar things in the future, like the HVG Tech section, which reports on scientific discoveries, like the Facebook page is liked.