The universe is often portrayed as a vast stretch of emptiness, but in reality, it’s filled with unfathomable explosions, mind-bending gravitational anomalies, and an untold number of cataclysmic collisions. Case in point: A team of astrophysicists at the Netherlands’ Leiden Observatory recently stumbled upon a particularly gigantic smash-up — one so big that when a giant, icy, would-be planet careened into another planetary neighbor, it produced enough haze to eclipse its parent star for 500 days.
