Scientists have discovered a cluster of carbon monoxide around a nearby star that suggests the presence of a massive hidden planet and several comets on a violent collision course.

According to Discovery News, the scientists used the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) telescope in Chile for their observations. The star, Beta Pictoris, located in the Pictor constellation, is slightly more massive and about nine times as luminous as the sun.

"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 a 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."

The researchers' work was published Thursday in the journal Science.

The planet known to be orbiting this ring of carbon monoxide and dust, which extends about three times the distance as Neptune is from the sun, is Beta Pictoris b. The researchers concluded that the dusty ring is made up of comets that came together on the gravitational pull of a supermassive planet. The researchers have also surmised that they are currently on a violent collision course with one another.

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

The team also observed the carbon monoxide to exist mostly in one clump about 13 billion kilometers from Beta Pictoris.

"This clump is an important clue to what is going on in the outer reaches of this young planetary system," study co-author Mark Wyatt, an astronomer at the University of Cambridge, U.K. "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."