Hubble Telescope Captures Dramatic Images of Asteroid Disintegration

Over a period of months, NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has recorded the never-before-seen break-up of an asteroid. The disintegrating Asteroid, dubbed P/2013 R3 can be seen in the images breaking up to as many as 10 smaller pieces.

According to NASA, this is the first time astronomers have seen an asteroid, in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, break apart like what is seen in these pictures from Hubble.

Below is a series of Hubble Telescope images of the Asteroid, P/2013 R3, disintegrating over a series of months – credit NASA

Unlike Comets, made of ice and dust, Asteroids are typically much more solid and unlikely to disintegrate like this. “This is a rock, and seeing it fall apart before our eyes is pretty amazing,” said David Jewitt of the University of California at Los Angeles, who led the astronomical forensics investigation.

According to NASA, asteroid P/2013 R3, was first noticed as an unusual, fuzzy-looking object by the Catalina and Pan STARRS sky surveys on Sept. 15, 2013. A follow-up observation on October 1 with the W. M. Keck Observatory on the summit of Mauna Kea, a dormant volcano on the island of Hawaii, revealed three bodies moving together in an envelope of dust nearly the diameter of Earth.

“The Keck Observatory showed us this thing was worth looking at with Hubble,” Jewitt said. “With its superior resolution, space telescope observations soon showed there were really 10 embedded objects, each with comet-like dust tails. The four largest rocky fragments are up to 400 yards in diameter, about four times the length of a football field.”