If , as a kid , you reel yourself around so many times you became dizzy enough to fall back your lunch , you might cognise how the asteroid P/2013 R3 feel ( if asteroids were sentient beings ) . P/2013 R3 , R3 for short , is the first main swath asteroid to have been observed disintegrate , and new inquiry attributes the physical process to unreasonable twirl .
Between August 2013 and February 2014 , R3 went from one object to at least 13 . Having only been discovered in September 2013 , we got to see much of this process . Unsurprisingly , junk was released in the process , enveloping the shard and making it difficult to see what was happening . However , Professor David Jewittof the University of California , Los Angeles has offered an account of the appendage .
Although it orbits within the master asteroid whang , risking collision , Jewitt proposes R3 was not destroyed by an impact . rather , he thinks it was spinning too quickly to hold itself together , andcentrifugal forcespulled the inauspicious asteroid aside .
We do n’t know much about R3 prior to the break - up , but the component part , with radii of a upper limit of 100 - 200 metre ( 330 - 660 feet ) would have formed a sphere with a radius up to 400 measure ( 1300 feet ) .
Jewitt tentativelyproposedthis theory for R3 ’s break - up three class ago . draw on observation of the fragments and dust from the Hubble Space Telescopes and some of the heavy telescopes on Earth , he thinks the evidence is now much stronger .
Such a break - up requires rapid spin , with a period believably less than 2.2 hour . However , if R3 had been spinning like this since its organisation it would have broken up long ago . So what give it the special tailspin ?
Although classified as an “ active asteroid ” , rather than a comet , R3 may well have contained some frozen urine , and when expose to sunlight this would have change state to gas pedal , providing torque as it run away the asteroid ’s open . Just 1 gram ( 0.03 ounces ) per second of loose piss would have been sufficient to induce sufficient whirl over a period of less than a million year .
An alternative explanation lie in theYORP effect , where the miniscule vigor imparted by photon of sunlight bouncing off an asteroid ’s weight surface produces torque , which return spin . Unlike a collision , spin induce by either escaping water supply or the YORP effect can explain why some of R3 ’s fragments broke up themselves so chop-chop after the initial separation .
In a report accepted for theAstronomical Journal , and available onarXiv.org , Jewitt calculates that events such as these make a “ measurable but probably not prevailing ” contribution to theZodiacal Dust Cloud , which orbit the Sun in the same plane as the planets and produces the Zodiacal light that under ideal conditions can sometimes be see at dusk .
[ H / T : Bad Astronomy ]
