Hubble Takes Close-up Look at Disintegrating Comet

NASA | SEPTEMBER 20, 2016

NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has captured one of the sharpest, most detailed observations of a comet breaking apart, which occurred 67 million miles from Earth.

This image reveals the ancient Comet 332P/Ikeya-Murakami disintegrating as it approaches the sun. The comet debris consists of a cluster of building-size chunks (center) that form a 3,000-mile-long trail. The fragments are drifting away from the comet. The main nucleus of Comet 332P is the bright object at lower left. Image credits: NASA, ESA, D. Jewitt (UCLA)

In a series of images taken over a three-day span in January 2016, Hubble revealed 25 building-size blocks made of a mixture of ice and dust that are drifting away from the comet at a leisurely pace, about the walking speed of an adult.

The observations suggest that the roughly 4.5-billion-year-old comet, named 332P/Ikeya-Murakami, or Comet 332P, may be spinning so fast that material is ejected from its surface. The resulting debris is now scattered along a 3,000-mile-long trail, larger than the width of the continental U.S.

These observations provide insight into the volatile behavior of comets as they approach the sun and begin to vaporize, unleashing dynamical forces. Comet 332P was 150 million miles from the sun, slightly beyond the orbit of Mars, when Hubble spotted the breakup.

The three-day observations reveal that the comet shards brighten and dim as icy patches on their surfaces rotate into and out of sunlight. Their shapes change, too, as they break apart.

The icy relics comprise about 4 percent of the parent comet and range in size from roughly 65 feet wide to 200 feet wide. They are moving away from each other at a few miles per hour.

The Hubble images show that the parent comet also changes brightness cyclically, completing a rotation every two to four hours. A visitor to the comet would see the sun rise and set in as little as an hour.

The comet is also much smaller than astronomers thought, measuring only 1,600 feet across, about the length of five football fields.

Based on the Hubble data, the research team suggests that sunlight heated up the comet, causing jets of gas and dust to erupt from its surface.

Because the nucleus is so small, these jets act like rocket engines, spinning up the comet’s rotation. The faster spin rate loosened chunks of material, which are drifting off into space.

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