Toxic Gas Created by Comet Collision Spotted by ALMA Telescope

Scientists have spotted a cluster of carbon monoxide around Beta Pictoris thanks to the Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA) Telescope in Chile.

The clumps of carbon monoxide are supposedly contributing to violent comet crashes that are visible to sky-watchers in certain locations around the world, according to an ESO press release.

Click here to read the full ESO press release. Observations were also published in the journal Science.

Carbon monoxide is "easily and rapidly" broken up by starlight, and it can only last around 100 years where it was observed in the Beta Pictoris disc.

"Unless we are observing Beta Pictoris at a very unusual time, the carbon monoxide must be continuously replenished," study lead author Bill Dent, an ESO astronomer at the Joint ALMA Office in Santiago, Chile, said in the press release. "The most abundant source of carbon monoxide in a young solar system is collisions between icy bodies, from comets up to larger planet-sized objects."

Seeing carbon monoxide, which is harmful to humans on Earth, in the Beta Pictoris disc at all was a surprise to scientists.

Despite being harmful to humans, the presence of carbon monoxide could mean that the Beta Pictoris planetary system may one day become a good habitat for life, according to the press release.

Beta Pictoris is 63 light years away and 20 million years old, compared to our solar system, which is 4.5 billion years old.

"To get the amount of carbon monoxide we observe, the rate of collisions would be truly startling - one large comet collision every five minutes," said Aki Roberge, an astronomer at NASA's Goddard Research Center in Greenbelt, USA, and coauthor of the paper, according to the press release. "To get this number of collisions, this would have to be a very tight, massive comet swarm."

There was another surprise discovered in the ALMA observations however. The scientists didn't just discover carbon monoxide, but also mapped its location in the disc, according to the press release.

Thanks to ALMA's ability to "simultaneously" measure both velocity and position, the scientists were able to tell that the gas is concentrated in a "single compact clump."

The concentration lies 13 billion kilometers from the star, which is approximately three times the distance of Neptune from the Sun.

"This clump is an important clue to what is going on in the outer reaches of this young planetary system," says Mark Wyatt, an astronomer at the University of Cambridge, UK, and a co-author on the paper, according to the press release. "Either the gravitational pull of an as yet unseen planet similar in mass to Saturn is concentrating the cometary collisions into a small area, or what we are seeing are the remnants of a single catastrophic collision between two icy Mars-mass planets".

More observations have been mapped out with ALMA, to learn more about the planetary system, in order to understand what conditions were like when the Solar System was first forming.