Infinite Space
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P/2013 R3 on November 15, 2013.
Hubble watched the slow disintegration of asteroid P/2013 R3 into 10 smaller pieces. The Hubble data revealed that the fragments are drifting away from each other at a leisurely one mile per hour — slower than the speed of a strolling human — which suggests the breakup is not the result of a collision.
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This video, assembled from a series of Hubble images, reveals the breakup of asteroid P/2013 R3 over a period of several months starting in late 2013. The largest fragments are up to 180 meters (200 yards) in radius, each with "tails" caused by dust lifted from their surfaces and pushed back by the pressure of sunlight. The ten pieces of the asteroid drift apart slowly and show a range of breakup times, suggesting that the disintegration cannot be explained by a collision with another asteroid. One idea for the breakup is that the asteroid was accelerated by sunlight to spin at a fast enough rate to fly apart by centrifugal force. The images were taken in visible light with Hubble's Wide Field Camera 3.