Found: A never-before-seen asteroid with six comet-like tails
Source: Los Angeles Times
Found: A never-before-seen asteroid with six comet-like tails
By Deborah Netburn
November 7, 2013, 12:14 p.m.
A bizarre, never-before-seen asteroid with six comet-like tails has been found in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, and scientists are shocked.
"I'm trying not to use the word 'freak,'" said David Jewitt of UCLA and lead author of a paper about the six-tailed asteroid, "but that's what it is. It is definitely freakish."
A NASA release described the asteroid as looking like "a rotating lawn sprinkler" with dust radiating out from it like spokes on a wheel.
What makes this find especially weird is that asteroids almost never have any kind of tail at all.
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Read more: http://www.latimes.com/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-asteroid-with-six-comet-like-tails-20131107,0,4090489.story
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...Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
Here are a few more details from Hubble Site - News Center:
Radiation pressure could have spun P/2013 P5 up. Jewitt said the spin rate could have increased enough that the asteroid's weak gravity no longer could hold it together. If that happened, dust could slide toward the asteroid's equator, shatter and fall off, and drift into space to make a tail. So far, only about 100 to 1,000 tons of dust, a small fraction of the P/2013 P5's main mass, has been lost. The asteroids nucleus, which measures 1,400 feet wide, is thousands of times more massive than the observed amount of ejected dust.
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"In astronomy, where you find one, you eventually find a whole bunch more," Jewitt said. "This is just an amazing object to us, and almost certainly the first of many more to come."
Jewitt said it appears P/2013 P5 is a fragment of a larger asteroid that broke apart in a collision roughly 200 million years ago. There are many collision fragments in orbits similar to P/2013 P5's. Meteorites from these bodies show evidence of having been heated to as much as 1,500 degrees Fahrenheit. This means the asteroid likely is composed of metamorphic rocks and does not hold any ice as a comet does.
Cool. Thanks for the post, Eugene.
Hubble finds asteroid with six spinning comet-like tails
Curated from NASA
Written by
Donna Weaver
J.D. Harrington
Ray Villard
Published on November 7, 2013
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Two images of P/2013 P5 show its “spinning tails”. Images courtesy of NASA[/font]
Astronomers viewing our solar system’s asteroid belt with NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope have seen for the first time an asteroid with six comet-like tails of dust radiating from it like spokes on a wheel.
Unlike all other known asteroids, which appear simply as tiny points of light, this asteroid, designated P/2013 P5, resembles a rotating lawn sprinkler. Astronomers are puzzled over the asteroid’s unusual appearance.
“We were literally dumbfounded when we saw it,” said lead investigator David Jewitt of the University of California at Los Angeles. “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.”
Jewitt leads a team whose research paper appears online in the Nov. 7 issue of the Astrophysical Journal Letters.
More:
http://descrier.co.uk/science/2013/11/hubble-finds-asteroid-six-spinning-comet-like-tails/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=hubble-finds-asteroid-six-spinning-comet-like-tails
