Scientists have noticed a "weird and freakish object" spinning through space like a lawn sprinkler.
The asteroid is located in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, but it is unlike anything the researchers have seen before, a University of California, Los Angeles, news release reported.
The object has dust tails coming out of it "like spokes on a wheel." The object could have been formed in an asteroid collision 200 million years ago.
"It's hard to believe we're looking at an asteroid," lead investigator David Jewitt, a professor in the UCLA Department of Earth and Space Sciences and the UCLA Department of Physics and Astronomy, said. "We were dumbfounded when we saw it. Amazingly, its tail structures change dramatically in just 13 days as it belches out dust."
The object was dubbed P/2013 P5, and has only been ejecting dust for about four or five months.
"The important thing is that we think the spin has changed because of the effects of sunlight, which carries enough momentum to spin-up a small asteroid, given enough time. How long [has it been spinning]? Maybe 100,000 years," Professor Jewitt told Headlines and Global News in an email.
One interpretation of the strange object is that it rotated so quickly that its surface started to literally "fly apart." This would explain the dust being rapidly ejected from the object.
When the asteroid was first spotted it appeared to be a "fuzzy-looking object." Later on, NASA's Hubble Space Telescope picked up images that suggested the asteroid had six tails; when the team looked at images about two weeks later they noticed the object looked as if it had "completely swung around."
"It is an asteroid in the inner part of the main belt between Mars and Jupiter. It has a nearly circular, uninclined orbit like the other asteroids. It just happens to eject dust. "Why?" is our first question," Jewitt told HNGN.
The team believes the tail may have been formed by "impulsive dust-ejection events," which occur when pressure from the Sun "smears out the dust into streamers." The asteroid may have started to begin spinning due to the Sun's torque.
If the asteroid starts spinning rapidly enough it could break apart because its gravity would not be strong enough to hold it together.
"Dust might avalanche downslope toward the asteroid's equator and eventually drift into space to make a tail. So far, only a small fraction of the asteroid's main mass -- perhaps 100 to 1,000 tons of dust -- has been lost, Jewitt said. The 700-foot-radius nucleus is thousands of times more massive," the news release reported.
The team will observe if the dust leaves via the equatorial plane, which would mean it had reached "rotational breakup."
"We will continue to examine it with Hubble and other telescopes, to see how it behaves. We can test the new observations against the spin-up hypothesis to see if that continues to work," Jewitt told HNGN.
Jewitt believes the asteroid could be less rare than we think, and it could even indicate how asteroids typically die.
"In astronomy, where you find one, you eventually find a whole bunch more," he said in the news release. "This is an amazing object and almost certainly the first of many more to come."
