NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has captured images of an asteroid breaking into pieces; an event astronomers had never observed before . This finding has been investigated by a team of astronomers from the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) and published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters .
The asteroid in question is P / 2013 R3 , one of the objects that abound in the asteroid belt located between the planets Mars and Jupiter and which was first detected on September 15, 2013 by the WM Keck Observatory in Hawaii . After transferring the tracking to Hubble, who later took snapshots of its evolution, we can say that this is the first time that a telescope has captured the rupture of an asteroid into smaller pieces .
Astronomers have counted 10 pieces of asteroid ; 4 of them are up to 200 meters in radius, which is twice the length of a football stadium. All the fragments are adrift and are still visible. This fact proves that the disintegration of the asteroid was not due to a collision with another rocky body, since the impact would have been more violent and instantaneous, but due to the subtle exposure to sunlight that caused the asteroid to rotate more rapidly and then begin. to break into pieces . The debris of the asteroid will provide a rich source of meteoroids in the future.
