Check out this never-before-seen object captured in these photographs by NASA’s Hubble space telescope.
It’s something that no astronomer has ever seen before – an asteroid with six comet-like tails that isn’t moving like a comet and it’s not made of ice. It’s just up there rotating like a dance club light.
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“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,” according to lead investigator David Jewitt of the University of California at Los Angeles. “We were completely knocked out.”
NASA says that “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.”
Jewitt and his colleagues have a theory about how this one-of-a-kind object came to be: a space collision.
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.
NASA also says that “they do not believe the tails are the result of an impact with another asteroid because they have not seen a large quantity of dust blasted into space all at once.” Wow!