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By Ray Villard and UCLA Newsroom
March 06, 2014
Astronomers (click here) have witnessed for the first time the
breakup of an asteroid into as many as 10 smaller pieces. The discovery
is published online March 6 in Astrophysical Journal Letters.
Though fragile comet nuclei have been seen falling
apart as they near the sun, nothing resembling this type of breakup has
been observed before in the asteroid belt. NASA's Hubble Space Telescope
photographed the demolition.
"Seeing this rock fall apart before our eyes is pretty
amazing," said David Jewitt, a professor in the UCLA Department of
Earth, Planetary and Space Sciences and the UCLA Department of Physics
and Astronomy, who led the astronomical forensics investigation.
The crumbling asteroid, designated P/2013 R3, was
first noticed as an anomalous, fuzzy-looking object on Sept. 15, 2013,
by the Catalina and Pan-STARRS sky-survey telescopes. A follow-up
observation on Oct. 1 with the W.M. Keck telescope on Hawaii's Mauna Kea
revealed three co-moving bodies embedded in a dusty envelope that is
nearly the diameter of Earth.
"The Keck telescope showed us that this asteroid was worth looking at with Hubble," Jewitt said......
