Watch This Asteroid Break Up Before Your Eyes
For the first time, astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope have photographed an asteroid breaking up as it orbits nearly 300 million miles away from the sun.
The asteroid, called P/2013 R3, has fragmented into 10 distinct pieces, each drifting away from the others at about a mile an hour. The largest of the pieces are about 650 feet in diameter.
“This is a really bizarre thing to observe,” Jessica Agarwal of Germany’s Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research said in a release. “We’ve never seen anything like it before.”
Astronomers first observed the asteroid in September using the Catalina Sky Survey in Arizona and the Pan-STARRS observatory in Hawaii. They then followed up using Hawaii’s Keck Telescope before turning to Hubble, which can get a sharper view of space objects than any ground-based telescope.
Because of Hubble’s clear resolution, astronomers were able to deduce that this happened to the asteroid because of a subtle process in which sunlight drives the asteroid’s rotation rate to increase over time, eventually forcing the asteroid’s weak interior structure to break apart. Though this process has been theorized for years, the release says, this is the first real-world observation of it.
The remaining pieces of P/2013 RS collectively weigh about 220 tons.
“Seeing it fall apart before our eyes is pretty amazing,” UCLA’s David Jewitt said in the release.
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