Olivier Hainaut, of the European Southern Observatory in Garching, Germany, detected this bizarre cosmological body called Gault. He said: “This self-destruction event is rare. Active and unstable asteroids such as Gault are just now being detected because of new survey telescopes that scan the entire sky, which means asteroids that are misbehaving such as Gault cannot escape detection anymore.”
Images from the Hubble space telescope show two narrow, comet-like tails of dusty debris streaming from the asteroid (6478) Gault.
Each tail represents an episode in which the asteroid shed its material, key evidence that Gault is beginning to come apart.
Gault’s disintegration has been strongly linked to a rare process known as a YORP effect.
The YORP acronym stands for “Yarkovsky–O’Keefe–Radzievskii–Paddack,” the names of four scientists who contributed to the concept.
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The concept describes how sunlight heats an asteroid, the resulting infrared radiation escaping from its warmed surface creates a rotational movement momentum.
The process creates a tiny torque that can cause the asteroid to continually spin faster.
When the resulting centrifugal force starts to overcome gravity, the asteroid’s surface becomes unstable, and landslides may send dust and rubble drifting into space at a couple miles per hour, or the speed of a strolling human.
The researchers estimate that Gault could have been slowly spinning up for more than 100 million years.
NASA said there are 900 asteroids with a diameter more than one kilometre orbiting Earth around the Sun, while the biggest is nearly 34 kilometres wide.
The US space administration and other countries’ agencies catalogue and track space objects.
According to NASA, if any object passes too close to Earth then it would launch a space campaign to deflect the object.
One of the “asteroid hunters” said there could be space rocks they don’t know about which could pose a threat to Earth.