Break up of P/2013 R3 asteroid captured by the Hubble Telescope. NASA, ESA, D. Jewitt (UCLA)
The Hubble Space Telescope has captured images of the disintegration of an asteroid into as many as ten smaller fragments for the first time.
The asteroid, designated P/2013 R3, was first spotted on 15 September 2013 by the Catalina and Pan-STARRS sky surveys, with further study with the Keck Telescope on 10 October revealed three bodies moving together in an envelope of dust nearly the diameter of Earth.
David Jewitt of the University of California at Los Angeles, who led the astronomical forensics investigation, said:
“The Keck Observatory showed us this thing was worth looking at with Hubble. With its superior resolution, space telescope observations soon showed there were really 10 embedded objects, each with comet-like dust tails. The four largest rocky fragments are up to 400 yards in diameter, about four times the length of a football field.”
The improved resolution offered by using the Hubble Telescope showed the three fragments slowly drifting away from each other at around 1mph, with the most recent images showing as many as ten fragments in the dust cloud.
This slow fragmentation of the rock asteroid means that it the break up was not caused by an impact with another asteroid of interior ice particles vaporising, but instead likely the result of the subtle effect of sunlight according to NASA. This effect has been hotly debated by scientists for years, but until now it had not been observed.
For sunlight to break up an asteroid like this, the interior of the rock would already have to been been weak and fractured from a number of previous collisions with other asteroid over the last billion years, and the pressure of the sunlight would have just enough power to then break it apart.
