Check out the aftermath of an asteroid collision

Back in the day when the Solar System seemed a simple place , asteroids were thought to be chunks of rocks whose features could be explain by impacts with other such objects .

Comets were altogether different , ladened with frigid material that erupted when heated by the Sun . It was a square word picture , at a metre when the organization had nine planets , icy ‘ dwarf planets ’ were not yet in trend , and distinctions between orbiting objects were clear drawn . Today we work with a more complicated scenario , one in which some objects once thought of as asteroids get comet - similar feature that can last for month .

Thus the interest in the asteroid called ( 596 ) Scheila , which of late last year originate plume after brightening out of the blue in December . Orbiting the Sun every five years , Scheila has a diameter of about 110 kilometers , and evidence from both the Hubble Space Telescope and the Swift planet now indicates that the strange activity here was induce by a collision with a humble asteroid . This is useful stuff , because the first asteroid hit identified – in 2009 involving asteroid P/2010 A2 – showed no collision shard , whereas Scheila ’s bodily process was get promptly after the collision , when evidence for what occur was readily available .

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The evidence do in the bod of images depict the asteroid with two dust plumes , sign of dust particles being pushed aside from the object by sunlight . Archival images show the tumultuous disturbance begin between November 11 and December 3 of 2010 , and it was on December 11 that the Catalina Sky Survey , which focuses primarily on near - Earth objects , discovered that Scheila had brightened to twice the norm and had set about to display a comet - like aureole .

But a follow - up spectrum taken with the Swift orbiter ’s Ultraviolet / Optical Telescope prove none of the discharge commonly associated with comets , and there was no reading of gas that would flag dead expose ice . The current thinking is that a small asteroid struck Scheila at an angle of less than 30 degrees , pull up stakes a 300 - meter crater . It was an wallop with a impact , says Michael Kelley ( University of Maryland ) , a carbon monoxide gas - author of the newspaper on this work :

“ The dust swarm around Scheila could be 10,000 fourth dimension as monumental as the one ejected from comet 9P / Tempel 1 during NASA ’s UMD - lead Deep Impact commission . Collisions allow us to glance inside comets and asteroids . Ejecta kicked up by Deep Impact contained lots of ice , and the absence of ice in Scheila ’s interior designate that it ’s completely unlike comet . ”

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The impactor would have been travel about 17,000 kilometre per hour , take up with the force of at least a 100 - kiloton atomic turkey . It is think that most of the detritus from the collision fell back to the asteroid , but the material that elude formed plumes that , as seen in the Hubble images taken two weeks after the result , had rapidly begin to disperse . A short two months after the outburst , there was no sign of the zodiac of the plume at all . It ’s likely that collision of this kind happen frequently in the principal belt , offering a admonitory tale for those preserve an oculus on asteroids nearer to rest home .

The paper is Bodewits et al . , “ Collisional Excavation of Asteroid ( 596 ) Scheila , ” Astrophysical Journal Letters Vol . 733 , No . 1 ( 2011 ) , p. 733 ( abstract / preprint ) . A shortvideois available from Goddard Space Flight Center .

Image : The Hubble Space Telescope imaged ( 596 ) Scheila on Dec. 27 , 2010 , when the asteroid was about 350 million kilometer away . Scheila is overexposed in this epitome to reveal the faint dust features . The asteroid is surrounded by a C - shape swarm of particles and displays a analogue dust tail in this visible - light picture acquired by Hubble ’s wide-cut athletic field Camera 3 . Because Hubble cross the asteroid during the vulnerability , the star simulacrum are trailed . credit entry : NASA / ESA / D. Jewitt ( UCLA ) .

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