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melikamp writes:

"Hot on the heels of finding a bizarre many-tailed asteroid, Hubble has now photographed the never-before-seen breakup of an asteroid into as many as 10 smaller pieces drifting away from each other at a leisurely 1.6 km/h. The crumbling of the asteroid P/2013 R3 is unlikely due to a collision with another asteroid, which would be instantaneous and violent by comparison to what has been observed. Nor is the asteroid coming unglued due to the pressure of interior ices warming and vaporizing, because it is far too cold. This leaves a scenario in which the asteroid is disintegrating due to a subtle effect of sunlight (possibly the YORP effect), which causes the rotation rate to slowly increase, and the pieces to gently pull apart due to centrifugal force."

1. "melikamp" - http://soylentnews.org/~melikamp
2. "many-tailed asteroid" - http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/archive/releases/2013/52/
3. "photographed" - http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/archive/releases/2014/15/
4. "unlikely" - http://hubblesite.org/pubinfo/pdf/2014/15/pdf.pdf
5. "YORP effect" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yarkovsky%E2%80%93O'Keefe%E2%80%93Radzievskii%E2%80%93Paddack_effect

printed from SoylentNews, Hubble Witnesses an Asteroid Disintegrating on 2024-05-23 19:35:05