Hawaiʻi Team Catches Asteroid As It Self-Destructs

MARCH 28, 2019

Contacts:

Dr. Jan Kleyna
UH Institute for Astronomy
kleyna@hawaii.edu
Cell: +1 808-391-2624 

Dr. Karen Meech
UH Institute for Astronomy 
meech@hawaii.edu
Cell: +1 720-231-7048

Dr. Larry Denneau
UH Institute for Astronomy
denneau@hawaii.edu

Dr. Roy Gal
Media Contact
UH Institute for Astronomy
roygal@hawaii.edu
Cell: +1 808-388-8690

Astronomers once thought asteroids were boring, wayward space rocks that simply orbit around the Sun. Only in science fiction movies were they dramatic, changing objects.

New observations are turning science fiction into science fact, showing that asteroids are anything but dull. Asteroid Gault, discovered in 1998, has begun to slowly disintegrate. The crumbling was first detected on Jan. 5, 2019 by the University of Hawaiʻi Institute for Astronomy (IfA) Asteroid Terrestrial-Impact Last Alert System (ATLAS) telescopes on Maunaloa and Haleakalā.

“Each night, the ATLAS survey scans the sky looking for hazardous near-Earth asteroids, and we also observe tens of thousands of known asteroids in the main asteroid belt,” said Larry Denneau, ATLAS Project Scientist. “Our collaborator Ken Smith in Belfast found an unusual looking moving object, and he alerted us that it might be a new comet. Instead, it turned out to be an asteroid in the main belt that just developed a comet-like tail. These events are rare and mysterious, and we were lucky to detect the event right after its turn-on.”

Gault is a well-known asteroid, and the newly found tails are the first evidence of any misbehavior. These new observations suggest that asteroids are dynamic, active worlds that can ultimately disintegrate due to the long-term subtle effect of sunlight, which can slowly spin them up until they begin to shed material.

Astronomers estimate that this type of event is rare, occurring roughly once a year among the 800,000 known asteroids between Mars and Jupiter. That’s why only the latest astronomical surveys — like ATLAS — that map vast swaths of the sky nightly, can catch asteroids as they fall apart.

“Asteroids such as Gault cannot escape detection anymore,” noted Olivier Hainaut of the European Southern Observatory in Garching, Germany, a member of the observing team. “That means that all these asteroids that start misbehaving get caught.”

Once the new tail was discovered, Denneau and IfA colleague Robert Weryk looked back into archival data from ATLAS and the University of Hawaiʻi (Panoramic Survey Telescope and Rapid Response System (Pan-STARRS) telescopes. The tail also turned up in data taken as far back as December 2018. In mid January, a second shorter tail was spied by Jan Kleyna using the Canada France Hawaiʻi Telescope (CFHT), as well as by other observers. An analysis of both tails suggests the two dust releases occurred around Oct. 28 and Dec. 30, 2018.

Tantalized by this new discovery, IfA astronomers Jan Kleyna and Karen Meech, along with colleagues from around the world, began to observe Gault with telescopes around the world and in space. Spectacular images of asteroid 6478 Gault from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope show two narrow, comet-like tails of debris streaming from the diminutive 2.5-mile-wide asteroid. The tails are telltale evidence that Gault is beginning to come apart by gently puffing off material in two separate episodes over the past several months.

Gault is only the second asteroid uncovered whose disintegration is decisively linked to a spin-up process, known as a YORP (Yarkovsky-O’Keefe-Radzievskii-Paddack) torque. When sunlight heats an asteroid, infrared radiation escaping from its warmed surface carries off momentum as well as heat. This creates a tiny force which can cause the asteroid to spin faster and faster. If this centrifugal force overcomes gravity, the surface becomes unstable, and landslides send dust and rubble drifting into space.

Watching an asteroid come unglued by this natural process gives astronomers the opportunity to study the makeup of these space rocks without sending a spacecraft to sample them. Analyzing an asteroid’s ingredients as they are spread out into space offers a glimpse into planet formation in the early solar system.

“We didn’t have to visit Gault,” explained Hainaut. “We just had to look at the image of the streamers, and we can see all of the dust grains sorted neatly by size. All the large grains (about the size of sand particles) are close to the object and the smallest grains (about the size of flour) are the farthest away, because they are being pushed fastest by pressure from sunlight.”

For astronomers, piecing together Gault’s recent volatile activity is an astronomical forensics investigation, involving telescopes and astronomers from around the world. The first clue was the accidental detection of the first debris tail.

Follow-up observations with the William Herschel Telescope and ESA Optical Ground Station in La Palma and Tenerife, and the Himalayan Chandra Telescope in India, measured a two-hour rotation period for the object, close to the critical speed at which a loose “rubble-pile” asteroid begins to break up. “Gault is the best ‘smoking-gun’ example of a fast rotator right at the two-hour limit,” Kleyna said.

But the seeds to this self-destruction may have been sown 100 million years ago, a time when the dinosaurs roamed Earth. Pressure from sunlight slowly began spinning up the tiny asteroid at an estimated rate of 1 second every 10,000 years.

“It could have been on the brink of instability for 10 million years,” Kleyna said. “Even a tiny disturbance, like a small impact from a pebble, might have triggered the recent outbursts.”

The researchers suggest that as the asteroid rotated ever faster, destabilized material began cascading toward the equator. When the rotation rate reached a critical point, landslides sent debris drifting off into space at a few miles per hour, or the speed of a strolling human. Gault’s weak surface gravity couldn’t hold it any longer. The gentle process was like scattering powdered sugar into the air, where wind — or, in the case of Gault, sunlight — stretches it into a long streamer.

An analysis of the asteroid’s immediate neighborhood by Hubble revealed no signs of excess dust, which rules out the possibility of a collision with another asteroid causing the outbursts.

Hubble’s sharp imaging also reveals that the tails are narrow streamers, indicating that the dust was released in short bursts, lasting anywhere from a few hours to a few days. These sudden events puffed away enough debris to make a “dirt ball” approximately 500 feet across if compacted together. The tails will begin fading away in a few months as the dust disperses into interplanetary space.

Based on observations by the CFHT, the astronomers estimated that the longer tail stretches over half a million miles and is roughly 3000 miles wide. The shorter tail is about a quarter as long.

Added Kleyna: “If the dust cloud lasts a couple of months, and the surveys see things once a month, we will see them. But if traditional observers are looking every couple of years, they’ll miss these events.”

The team said that this discovery shows the synergy between all-sky surveys such as ATLAS and Pan-STARRS, ground based telescopes, and space-based facilities like the Hubble Space Telescope. This discovery would have been impossible without contributions from all three.

The researchers hope to monitor Gault for more dust events.

The team’s results have been accepted for publication and will appear in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

The NASA-funded ATLAS program is described at http://atlas.fallingstar.com .

The NASA press release is available at http://hubblesite.org/news_release/news/2019-22

The international team of astronomers in this study are: Jan Kleyna (University of Hawaiʻi Institute for Astronomy, Honolulu, Hawaiʻi), Olivier Hainaut (European Southern Observatory, Germany), Karen Meech (University of Hawaiʻi Institute for Astronomy, Honolulu, Hawaiʻi), Henry Hsieh (Planetary Science Institute, Honolulu, Hawaiʻi; and Academia Sinica Institute of Astronomy and Astrophysics, Taipei, Taiwan), Alan Fitzsimmons (Queen’s University Belfast Astrophysics Research Centre, Belfast, United Kingdom), Marco Micheli (European Space Agency Near Earth Object Coordination Centre, Rome, Italy; and National Institute for Astrophysics — Osservatorio Astronomico di Roma, Italy), Jacqueline Keane, Larry Denneau, John Tonry, and Aren Heinze (University of Hawaiʻi Institute for Astronomy, Honolulu, Hawaiʻi), Bhuwan Bhatt and Devendra Sahu (Indian Institute for Astrophysics, Bangalore, India), Detlef Koschny (European Space Agency European Space Research and Technology Centre, Noordwijk, The Netherlands; Near Earth Object Coordination Centre, Rome, Italy; and Technical University of Munich, Munich, Germany), Ken Smith (Queen’s University Belfast Astrophysics Research Centre, Belfast, United Kingdom), and Harald Ebeling, Robert Weryk, Heather Flewelling, and Richard Wainscoat (University of Hawaiʻi Institute for Astronomy, Honolulu, Hawaiʻi).

The Hubble Space Telescope is a project of international cooperation between NASA and ESA (European Space Agency). NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, manages the telescope. The Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Baltimore, Maryland, conducts Hubble science operations. STScI is operated for NASA by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy in Washington, D.C.

Founded in 1967, the Institute for Astronomy at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa conducts research into galaxies, cosmology, stars, planets, and the sun. Its faculty and staff are also involved in astronomy education, deep space missions, and in the development and management of the observatories on Haleakalā and Maunakea. The Institute operates facilities on the islands of Oahu, Maui, and Hawaiʻi.