![]() ![]() ![]() Icy materials may be occasionally exposed, either by internal geological processes or by an external one, such as an impact. However, this simple picture has grown more complex over the past few years.ĭuring certain parts of their orbits, some objects, once categorized as asteroids, clearly develop comet-like features that can last for many months. ![]() They regarded asteroids as inactive rocks whose destinies, surfaces, shapes and sizes were determined by mutual impacts. The studies will appear in the May 20 edition of The Astrophysical Journal Letters and are available online.Īstronomers have known for decades that comets contain icy material that erupts when warmed by the sun. Hubble did not see any discrete collision fragments, unlike its 2009 observations of P/2010 A2, the first identified asteroid collision. “The Hubble data are most simply explained by the impact, at 11,000 mph, of a previously unknown asteroid about 100 feet in diameter,” said Hubble team leader David Jewitt at the University of California in Los Angeles. Scheila is approximately 70 miles across and orbits the sun every five years. Millions of them orbit the sun between Mars and Jupiter in the main asteroid belt. “Yet this is the first time we’ve been able to catch one just weeks after the smash-up, long before the evidence fades away.”Īsteroids are rocky fragments thought to be debris from the formation and evolution of the solar system approximately 4.6 billion years ago. “Collisions between asteroids create rock fragments, from fine dust to huge boulders, that impact planets and their moons,” said Dennis Bodewits, an astronomer at the University of Maryland in College Park and lead author of the Swift study. Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center COURTESY OF LUCASFILM LTD.) Download this video in HD formats from NASA Goddard’s Scientific Visualization Studio. (Star Wars: Episode V – The Empire Strikes Back™ & © 19 Lucasfilm Ltd. Swift and Hubble then turned to it and caught the remnants of an asteroid smash-up just weeks after the collision occurred. In late 2010, images from the University of Arizona’s Catalina Sky Survey, a project of NASA’s Near Earth Object Observations Program, revealed an outburst from asteroid Scheila. ![]()
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