Science

NASA asteroid: See incredible moment spinning asteroid COMES APART in flash of light


’s Hubble snapped the 2.5-miles-wide (four kilometres) asteroid rapidly disintegrating in space. Hubble Telescope images combined with data from other observatories show two distinct trails of rubble behind the asteroid. Dusty trails like these are commonly associated with icy comets, which slowly break down and sublimate under the immense pressure of the Sun. But the asteroid, dubbed by astronomers Asteroid 6478 Gault, is showing off similar behaviour by spinning rapidly enough to break apart.

The incredible rock was first observed in 1988 but Hubble’s latest discovery is the first sign of the asteroid falling apart.

Asteroid Gault is now hurtling through space some 214 million miles (344 million kilometres) from the Sun.

Gault is just one of the 800,000 known space rocks in the solar system’s asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.

But according to NASA, this type of behaviour is believed to be an incredibly rare occurrence of maybe one disintegrating asteroid per year.

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Astronomers hope Hubble’s discovery can help scientists learn more about the makeup of without having to send costly probes to their surface.

Olivier Hainaut of the European Southern Observatory in Germany, explained: “We didn’t have to go to Gault. We just had to look at the image of the streamers, and we can see all of the dust grains well-sorted by size.

“All the large grains, about the size of sand particles, are close to the object and the smallest grains, about the size of flour grains, are the farthest away because they are being pushed fastest by pressure from sunlight.”

The longest of Asteroid Gault’s two tails is estimated to stretch over 500,000 miles (800,000km) and measures about 3,000 miles (4,800km) in width.

The trail was first observed on January 5, 2019, by the NASA-supported Asteroid Terrestrial-Impact Last Alert System (ATLAS) telescope in Hawaii.

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NASA said the second, shorter tail only measures about a quarter of the first’s length.

This trail was spotted shortly after the first one by the Canada–France–Hawaii Telescope in Hawaii and the Isaac Newton Telescope in Spain.

Given enough time, both streamers are expected to fade out and disperse through space.

The asteroid’s self-destructive rotation was linked to an effect known as the YORP effect or the Yarkovsky–O’Keefe–Radzievskii–Paddack effect.

The YORP effect occurs when direct sunlight heats up an asteroid enough to cause infrared radiation to escape from the space rock’s surface.

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The radiation carries with it enough heat and momentum to cause the asteroid to spin faster and faster as time goes by.

Eventually, NASA said, the centrifugal forces of spring overcome the asteroid’s gravity enough to destabilise the rock’s surface.

When this happens, landslides on the asteroid shoot off pits and pieces of rock and dust at speeds raining from “a couple miles per hour, or the speed of a strolling human”.

NASA said Asteroid Gault’s rotation has likely been slowly building in speeds for more than 100 million years.

Asteroid Gault is the second ever space rock whose spinning was linked to the YORP effect.



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