Hubble Images Reveal Aftermath of Asteroid Collision

These seven Hubble Space Telescope images, taken over a five-month period, show the odd-shaped debris from a collision between two asteroids.

The Hubble images, taken from January to May 2010 with Wide Field Camera 3, reveal a point-like object about 400 feet (120 meters) wide, with a long, flowing dust tail behind a never-before-seen X pattern. Particle sizes in the tail are estimated to vary from about 1/25th of an inch (a millimeter) to an inch (2.5 centimeters) in diameter. The tail contains enough dust to make a ball 65 feet (20 meters) wide, most of it blown out of the bigger body by the impact-caused explosion.

The asteroid debris, dubbed P/2010 A2, appears to be shrinking in each successive image because Earth's faster orbit is carrying the planet away from the object. Between January and May, Earth rotated more than 100 million miles away from the debris field. During the observations, the X pattern remained intact.

P/2010 A2 was found cruising around the asteroid belt, a reservoir of millions of rocky bodies between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter.

The images were taken in visible light and artificially colored blue.

About the colours

This image was originally black and white and recorded only overall brightness. These brightness values were translated into a range of bluish hues. Such color "maps" can be useful in helping to distinguish subtly varying brightness in an image.

About the data

The image was created from Hubble data from proposals 12053 , 12077 , and 12305 : D. Jewitt (UCLA), H. Weaver (JPL/APL), M. Drahus (UCLA), and M. Mutchler (STScI).