Six-tailed asteroid stuns scientists

[Buster's Uncle]

Six-tailed asteroid stuns scientists
AFP
4 hours ago



This NASA Hubble Space Telescope set of images reveals a never-before-seen set of six comet-like tails radiating from a body in the asteroid belt, designated P/2013 P5 (AFP Photo/)



Washington (AFP) - A strange asteroid that appears to have multiple rotating tails has been spotted with NASA's Hubble telescope between Mars and Jupiter, astronomers said Thursday.

Instead of appearing as a small point of light, like most asteroids, this one has half a dozen comet-like dust tails radiating out like spokes on a wheel, said the report in Astrophysical Journal Letters.

"It's hard to believe we're looking at an asteroid," said lead investigator David Jewitt, a professor in the University of California Los Angeles Department of Earth and Space Sciences.

"We were dumbfounded when we saw it. Amazingly, its tail structures change dramatically in just 13 days as it belches out dust."

The object has been named P/2013 P5, and astronomers believe it has been spewing dust for at least five months.

The asteroid may have started spinning so fast that it began to disintegrate, scientists say.

They don't think the tails are a result of an impact, because that would cause dust to spray out all at once.

Its multiple tails were discovered in images taken by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope on September 10, 2013, after first being spotted with a telescope in Hawaii.

Jewitt said the object may have come from an asteroid collision some 200 million years ago. Its pattern of dispersing dust in fits and bursts may be how it slowly dies.

“In astronomy, where you find one, you eventually find a whole bunch more,” he said. “This is an amazing object and almost certainly the first of many more to come.”


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[Buster's Uncle]

Astronomers Spot A Never-Before-Seen Comet-Like Thing In The Sky
Business InsiderBy Dina Spector | Business Insider – 5 hours ago



NASA/ESA



This NASA Hubble Space Telescope set of images reveals a never-before-seen set of six comet-like tails radiating from a body in the asteroid belt.

Astronomers have spotted something in the sky that they've never seen before: An asteroid with comet-like tails.

These features "distinguish this object from any other," scientists write in a paper published the journal Astrophysical Journal Letters.

Asteroids and comets come from the same place — they are both believed to be ancient remains from when our solar system was formed more than 4 billion years ago — but differ based on what they are made of as well as their orbits.

Asteroids are made of rock and metal, and generally appear as tiny points of light in our Earth-based telescopes. Most asteroids orbit the sun in a tightly-packed belt — known as the main asteroid belt — located between Mars and Jupiter.

Comets, on the hand, are typically made of ice, dust, and rock. When comets gets close to the sun, the heat causes the ice to vaporize. The vaporizing gas takes the dust with it and forms a tail that can sometimes be seen from Earth. Comets tend to orbit the  outer-edge of the solar system in the Oort Cloud or the Kupier belt, which is just beyond the orbit of Neptune. 

The strange asteroid — known as P/2013 PF — was first spotted in August orbiting at the inner edge of the main asteroid belt, according to the study. It was first described "as an unusually fuzzing-looking object," according to a statement from the European Space Agency (ESA).



A labeled view of the apparent rotation between Sept. 10 and Sept. 23.  NASA/ESA


One month later, astronomers were surprised to discover six comet-like tails busting out from the asteroid in Hubble images taken on Sept. 10, 2013. When Hubble took another look at the object on Sept. 23, the asteroid looked like it had turned in the opposite direction.

"We were literally dumbfounded when we saw it," lead investigator David Jewitt of the University of California at Los Angeles said. "Even more amazingly, its tail structures change dramatically in just 13 days as it belches out dust. That also caught us by surprise. It's hard to believe we're looking at an asteroid."


So what's going on?

One theory is that the asteroid is rotating so fast that dust is slipping off the surface of the rock and flying out into space. Radiation pressure from the sun then drags the dust into long tails, according to Jessica Agarwal, a co-author of the study from the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research in Germany.



NASA/ESA


This is a diagram of the structure seen around an active asteroid designated P/2013 P5.

The dust isn't being ejected all at once — as it would have if something out in space had struck the asteroid — so this rules out an asteroid collision.

Agarwal calculated that each tail was ejected at a different time over the last five months. The first one appeared on April 15 and the last one on Sept. 4.

Scientists believe that the asteroid's spin rate is increasing due to the pressure of solar radiation. This weakens the gravity that holds the asteroid together causing dust to fall off.


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Bizarre Asteroid with Six Tails Spotted by Hubble Telescope (Photos)
SPACE.com
By Megan Gannon, News Editor  4 hours ago






Astronomers have spotted a never-before-seen phenomenon in our solar system's asteroid belt: a space rock with six tails, spewing dust from its nucleus like spouts of water radiating from a lawn sprinkler.

Scientists using the Pan-STARRS 1 telescope at the summit of Maui's Haleakala volcano in Hawaii first detected the six-tailed asteroid in August. They dubbed it P/2013 P5 and noted that it looked fuzzier than typical asteroids, which usually appear as tiny points of light. More detailed observations with the powerful Hubble Space Telescope in September revealed a clearer picture of asteroid, showing it had six comet-like tails.

"We were literally dumbfounded when we saw it," researcher David Jewitt of the University of California at Los Angeles said in a statement from NASA. "Even more amazing, its tail structures change dramatically in just 13 days as it belches out dust. That also caught us by surprise. It's hard to believe we're looking at an asteroid."

In the time between Hubble's first observation on Sept. 10 and its second peek at the asteroid on Sept. 23, the tails appeared to have completely swung around. Jewitt said he and his colleagues were "completely knocked out" by this finding.

The tails seem to have formed in bursts and not all at once, which is why the researchers don't think they formed as the result of an impact with another asteroid.



This labeled view of asteroid P/2013 P5 shows clearly how its appearance changed in the course of just 13 days.

 
Rather, P/2013 P5 could have sprouted dust tails after it started spinning out of control. The researchers suspect radiation pressure caused the asteroid to start rotating faster and faster until its weak gravity no longer could hold it together, sending the surface material of the space rock flying off at several points in the asteroid's recent history.

The researchers even pinpointed when they think these recent dust-ejection events may have occurred, in a series of spurts from April to September.

Though seeing a six-tailed space rock is a first for astronomers, the new research hints that there could be more asteroids with debris trails emanating from their center.

"In astronomy, where you find one, you eventually find a whole bunch more," Jewitt said in a statement. "This is just an amazing object to us, and almost certainly the first of many more to come."



Named P/2013 P5, this object is the first body in the asteroid belt to be spotted with multiple tails


P/2013 P5 has only lost a fraction of its mass, about 100 to 1,000 tons of dust, which represents a tiny portion of the 1,400-foot-wide (425 meters) asteroid, the scientists said.

While P/2013 P5 likely isn't a victim of a recent collision, researchers think the asteroid may be one of the leftover fragments of a much larger space rock that broke apart 200 million years ago. And the space rock likely doesn't contain any water, the scientists believe, based on previous examinations of collision fragments that were in orbits similar but have to P/2013 P5 have made it down to Earth's surface in the form of meteorites.

The Hubble Space Telescope is a joint project between NASA and the European Space Agency. The observations were detailed online in the Nov. 7 issue of the Astrophysical Journal Letters.


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