Around some young stars where star formation has recently ended, there swirl not just dust rings but actual planetary battlefields — extreme debris disks. Unlike quiescent protoplanetary disks, these cosmic scrapyards hold in their infrared glow evidence of catastrophes capable of vaporizing entire planets. The telescope of Herschel once discovered infrared light invisible to the eye. Today its distant descendant JWST transforms this radiation into spectral signatures of pulverized rock. The main witness: cosmic dust. Its mineral composition reveals the energy and scale of the impact, much like shattered headlights on the road speak of collision speed.

Acting as the forensic lab is mid-infrared spectroscopy. James Webb, together with archival photometry data from WISE and old Spitzer, enabled fingerprinting of minerals. The characteristic peak at 10 micrometers is a spectral detector: if the emission has an excess of silicon dioxide and oxygen: it is a telltale of a hypervelocity impact with melting and vaporization, akin to the one that birthed the Moon. In 8 out of 21 studied systems (38%), precisely this high-temperature glassy "ash" was found. The remaining disks, poor in silica but rich in forsterite, point to a less energetic but perhaps more frequent series of rearrangements, as if after the main smash, multiple secondary collisions follow.

Such mineralogical forensics turns dust disks into geological labs light-years away. We read collision histories like a geologist examining rock thin sections, but on scales of solar systems. The link between the abundance of submicron particles and a fivefold brightness variability in the near-infrared gives a simple recipe: if you spot flickering, search for a recent catastrophe. This leads us to seek worlds undergoing orbital reshuffling and brings us closer to figuring out how typical the tumultuous coming-of-age of our Solar System was. Each such catastrophe is not only an end but also a possible beginning: the shock wave could spread water and organics across the system, turning destruction into a sower of life. Data have not yet revealed a dependence on stellar evolution or multiplicity, but the statistics are growing. The next generation of observations, including JWST at 20 microns and millimeter-wave antennas of ALMA, promises to separate hot and cold components, reconstruct the detailed picture, and possibly catch the event itself — the birth of a new cloud of impact dust. The discovery by Mayor and Queloz of the first exoplanets only whetted the appetite; now we are studying not just worlds, but their collisions and deaths.