The Spitzer Space Telescope, located about 44-million miles from earth in a similar one-year, sun-centered orbit, has detected an apparent collision between giant asteroids - the kind from which planets are made.

An eruption of dust around NGC 2547-ID8 -- a young star scientists have regularly been tracking -- was spotted between August 2012 to January 2013 and gave the scientific community its first ever opportunity to scientists collect data before and after a planetary system impact.

While the cloudy residues of possible asteroid run-in were recorded by Spitzer before, the particular event offered extraordinary insights into the tumultuous process that creates rocky worlds like Earth.

The results of the findings have been posted online in the journal Science.

"We think two big asteroids crashed into each other, creating a huge cloud of grains the size of very fine sand, which are now smashing themselves into smithereens and slowly leaking away from the star," lead author and graduate student Huan Meng of the University of Arizona, Tucson, said in a news release.

According to researchers with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, rocky planets begin as dusty material circling young stars that starts to clump together over time to eventually form asteroids -- which subsequently violently run into each other.

The material left over from the those terrific asteroid run-ins end up coalescing into proto-planets.

Then, after tens of millions of years, such objects mature into full-grown, terrestrial planets.

Earth's moon is believed to have formed from a similar impact between proto-Earth and an object the size of today's planet Mars.

As detailed in the NASA release about the study, after Spitzer's infrared scanners had spent moths trained months on NGC 2547-ID8, which is about 35 million years old and lies 1,200 light-years away in the Vela constellation, it was briefly turned away from the direction of the star because our sun was in the way.

Then, later, when it refocused on the distant star system about five months later, scientists were "shocked" from by the latest data they were reading.

"We not only witnessed what appears to be the wreckage of a huge smashup, but have been able to track how it is changing -- the signal is fading as the cloud destroys itself by grinding its grains down so they escape from the star," said study author Kate Su, also from the University of Arizona. "Spitzer is the best telescope for monitoring stars regularly and precisely for small changes in infrared light over months and even years."

Now, a very thick cloud of dusty debris now orbits the star in the zone where rocky planets form.

"We are watching rocky planet formation happen right in front of us," said George Rieke, another study co-author. "This is a unique chance to study this process in near real-time."