Webb sees the aftermath of planetary collisions: a third of extreme dust disks are silica-rich

The James Webb Space Telescope studied 21 extreme debris disks around young stars, and about a third are silica-rich, pointing to violent collisions between Mars-sized bodies, NASA said. The paper was published in The Astrophysical Journal.

Such disks appear only around stars younger than 300 million years, and only about one percent of young stars show this stage. It is the period in which our own Moon is thought to have formed, after the young Earth collided with a Mars-sized body.

"Before Webb, we had limited information," said lead author Kate Su.