Hubble observed and confirmed that the suspicious object is indeed a remnant of an asteroid collision

The object that was discovered a month ago and is in the asteroid belt is similar in structure to a comet because it is in the center of a stream of dust and gravel, remnants of a collision between small asteroids that occurred not long ago.

The Hubble Space Telescope observed the strange bone containing X-shaped fragments and a long tail of dust that scientists who discovered it about a month ago predicted was a remnant of an asteroid collision. The astronomers believed that the asteroid holidays are an arena for collisions, but so far they have not observed such a collision.

The bone, known as P/2010 A2 We reported on him when the discovery was published Discovered by the Lincoln Near-Earth Asteroid Research Automated Linar Observatory on October 6. Astronomers thought it was an "asteroid belt comet" a rare case of a comet moving in the asteroid belt. Hubble photographed this object on January 25 and 29, and in these images the complex X-shaped pattern of fragments near the nucleus was revealed.

"It's quite different from the smooth dust envelope of normal comets," says lead researcher David Jewitt of the University of California, Los Angeles. "The fragments are made of dust and gravel that were apparently recently thrown out of the core. Some of the particles in this pile of dirt were blown back by the radiation pressure from the sunlight and formed a band of dust that is combined with the fragments moving together, which probably originate from bodies that collided and which have not been observed so far.

Hubble discovered that P/2010 A2 itself is outside the dust halo. This thing has not been seen so far in comet-like objects. The diameter of the core is estimated at about 200 meters.

Ordinary comets falling into the inner solar system from the ice reservoirs in the Kuiper belt and Oort cloud. When the comets approach the sun they heat up, their nucleus evaporates and materials are ejected from the rocky ground by the jets. However, P/2010 A2 may come from another source. They remain in the inner hot regions of the solar system in the asteroid belt, where their nearest neighbors are rocky trees that lack volatiles.

This leaves open the hypothesis that the tail of these remains originates from a collision between two bodies, and not just from ice melting from its parent body.

If this interpretation is correct, two previously unknown small bodies recently collided and created a debris shower trailing a tail from the collision site in sunlight. Jewitt said.

Asteroid collisions are a high-energy phenomenon, occurring at an average speed of 20 km/h, 5 times faster than a rifle bullet. The main nucleus of the P/2010 A2 is the remnant of the high-speed collision.

The debris-filled appearance of P/2010 A2 is different from anything we've seen in Hubble's photographs of normal comets so far, and is caused by completely different processes," said Jewitt. The hypothesis of objects that collided may be thick with the absence of gas in the spectral records recorded by ground-based telescopes. "

The asteroid belt is full of evidence of ancient collisions that tore large bodies into small pieces. P/2010 A2's orbit is consistent with it being a member of the Flora group of asteroids formed by a collision that occurred 100 million years ago. One of the fragments of the ancient group is apparently the one that hit the Earth 65 million years ago and caused the extinction of the dinosaurs, but not a single asteroid collision has been caught in action - until now.

At the time Hubble took the photographs, the asteroid was 280 million kilometers from the Sun and 150 million kilometers from Earth. The photographs were taken using Planetary Camera No. 3 - which was installed on Hubble in 2009.

For information on the NASA website