The asteroid is located around 214 million miles from the Sun.
The Hubble Space Telescope—jointly operated by NASA and the European Space Agency—has captured spectacular images of a rare event: an asteroid which is spinning so fast that it is self-destructing.
The sharp images enabled the researchers to infer that this ejection of material occurred in short episodes, which could have lasted anywhere from a few hours to a couple of days. Researchers say that 6478 Gault is only the second asteroid which has been observed disintegrating as a result of a process known as the YORP effect. This phenomenon occurs when sunlight heats an asteroid and causes it to spin faster and faster to the point where the object becomes unstable.
The Hubble imaging of the asteroid was just one part of an international collaborative effort involving several other observatories aiming to understand the nature of the self-destructing object. The results of this effort are scheduled to be published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters. Observing such a rare event gives astronomers a prime opportunity to study the composition of these objects—without sending a spacecraft to the object—in an endeavour which could provide valuable insights into how planets formed in the early years of the Solar System.
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