Using the Hubble Space Telescope, astronomers were able to capture the most detailed images of a comet as it breaks apart millions of miles from the planet Earth.
Publishing their discovery in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, David Jewitt and colleagues gathered images over the course of three days back in January, showing 25 fragments of dust and ice drifting away a 4.5-billion-year-old comet called 332P/Ikeya-Murakami, or 332P, at a speed that is the equivalent of an adult's walking speed.
According to the astronomers, the images captured suggest that the comet may be spinning around so fast that it is ejecting material from its surface. This has resulted in debris that is now littered along a trail bigger than continental America's width and about 3,000 miles in length.
According to Jewitt, these observations gave the research team a glimpse into the kind of volatile behavior that comets have as they make their journey to the sun and start vaporizing, which releases powerful forces.
"We know that comets sometimes disintegrate, but we don't know how much about why or how," he said.
The disintegration process occurs without warning and happens so quickly that astronomers don't have a lot of chances to gather data. With Hubble, however, the telescope's outstanding resolution has made it possible not only to see faint, tiny pieces of the 332P but also to observe the changes happening to it day by day.
During the three days the comet was under observation, Jewitt and colleagues saw that its shards lit up and dimmed as patches of ice on the 332P's surface rotated into and out of the sun's rays. The shards would also change shape as they broke apart and were believed to make some 4 percent of the original comet. Some of the shards were as big as 200 feet wide while others were just about 65 feet in width. As they orbited the sun at over 50,000 mph, the shards were separating at just a few miles for every hour.
Given the rate it's fragmenting, the 332P is estimated to still have enough mass for up to 25 more outbursts. And if it were to have an outburst every six years, every time it completes a trip around the sun, the comet will be no more in a span of 150 years.
Comet 332P was discovered by two Japanese amateur astronomers in November 2010. It's actually smaller than expected, measuring just 1,600 feet across, or about five football fields long. It hails from the Kuiper belt, just beyond Neptune, and was pushed into its current by Jupiter's gravity.
