Astronomers say unusual readings from a star system 11,000 light-years away suggest that two of the planets circling the star crashed into each other, creating a huge, light-obscuring cloud of rocks and dust.

The analysis, laid out this week in a paper published by The Astrophysical Journal Letters, could provide new insights into the occasionally cataclysmic process that governs the evolution of planetary objects — including our own planet Earth and its moon.

“There are only a few other planetary collisions of any kind on record, and none that bear so many similarities to the impact that created the Earth and moon,” University of Washington graduate student Anastasios Tzanidakis, the study’s lead author, said in a news release. If we can observe more moments like this elsewhere in the galaxy, it will teach us lots about the formation of our world.”

Tzanidakis found the first clues while combing through archival data from the Gaia spacecraft and other sky surveys. He was particularly intrigued by Gaia20ehk, a sunlike star near the constellation Puppis.

“The star’s light output was nice and flat, but starting in 2016 it had these three dips in brightness. And then, right around 2021, it went completely bonkers,” Tzanidakis recalled. “I can’t emphasize enough that stars like our sun don’t do that. So when we saw this one, we were like ‘Hello, what’s going on here?’ ”