Thursday, October 21, 2010

x-shaped head

Hubble Space Telescope is just amazing. From January to May 2010, HST took images of a point like object with a long dusty tail, living between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. As you can see in the images below, this object has an x-shaped head, which states that something stranger than a comet outgassing might have happened to shape this weird x.


"Astronomers think a smaller rock, perhaps 10 to 15 feet wide, slammed into the larger one. The pair probably collided at high speed, about 11,000 mph, which smashed and vaporized the small asteroid and stripped material from the larger one. Jewitt estimates that the violent encounter happened in February or March 2009 and was as powerful as the detonation of a small atomic bomb.", Nasa Science News.

There is yet no good explanation for this x shape. But they plan to use HST next year to observe this object again and study its evolution.

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