Precisely what is
happening here beggars the imagination.
What is suggested makes little sense.
1
do we have earlier images of this region
in space? Just how long has this been
going on?
2
The spinning is surely driven by the
jets themselves. Millions of years of
light pressure is errant nonsense.
3
The gas drive and surrounding plume is
surely recent by all relative measures.
So what triggered it? Why is it
hot enough to produce these jets?
4
Something is odd here and may not be
necessarily natural. Is this a common event
we should have long since encountered or is it a remarkable coincidence.
Is this a remnant to
the comet that impacted Jupiter? That at
least fits the time frames.
'Weird' OBJECT moving
by its own JETS seen beyond Mars orbit by Hubble
Hubble
snaps 'freakish' astro-thing
Pic A
bizarre spinning object, described by NASA as "weird and freakish"
and shooting jets of matter that cause it to move, has been spotted in our
Solar System.
The
mysterious rock, located in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, was
seen spewing matter from its surface by the Hubble space telescope on September
10. Then in a second image taken on September 23 the asteroid, dubbed P/2013
P5, appeared to have swung around significantly.
Professor
David Jewitt – of the Department of Earth and Space Sciences at the University
of California, Los Angeles – told The Register that the appearance of
the asteroid is unique, and the team has some ideas of how it came to exhibit
such unusual characteristics.
"One
idea was that we were seeing ice on the asteroid outgassing, but the object is too hot, around 170
Kelvin, for ice," he explained. "An impact with the asteroid was
discussed but that would leave one large plume, not six."
The
current idea is that the asteroid is being spun around so quickly that it is
breaking apart under the strain of its own rotation. The spin is probably the
result of hundreds of thousands of years of slight pressure from solar
emissions.
Stars
like our Sun emit protons and radiation that can push against objects in its
heliosphere, and for asteroids of a certain shape these emissions cause
rotation. Since the pressure from the Sun is constant, and space is virtually
frictionless, then asteroids can spin faster and faster until they
disintegrate.
This
YORP effect (named after the four scientists who contributed to the theory:
Yarkovsky, O'Keefe, Radzievskii, and Paddack) has been suggested as a reason
for the relative paucity of small, asymmetrical objects within our Solar System
in comparison to rounder rocks, and the search is now on for more observations
of the theory in action.
"In
astronomy, where you find one, you eventually find a whole bunch more,"
said Prof Jewitt, whose study of the rock [PDF] was published in the Astrophysical
Journal of Letters. "This is an amazing object and almost certainly the
first of many more to come." ®
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