When a probe smashed into a small asteroid last year, the collision did more than change the asteroid’s orbit — it blasted a few dozen hefty boulders into space too.
The boulders probably aren’t bits that were pulverized from larger rocks during the impact. Instead, simulations suggest they were likely intact when they were blasted off Dimorphos and could have been launched off the moonlet’s rubble-covered surface by the energy of either the collision or the seismic waves bouncing around inside it in the wake of the impact.
Still, “there’s a lot of uncertainty in such simulations,” planetary astronomer David Jewitt of the University of California, Los Angeles.
Based on the brightness of the new objects, some of the dimmest ever spied by Hubble in our solar system, Jewitt and colleagues estimate that these boulders may be as wide as 7 meters. At least 15 are larger than 4 meters across. Together, the researchers calculate, the boulders probably weigh just over 5 million kilograms — roughly the weight of 300 dump truck loads of gravel.
2023-07-21 16:10:06
Link from www.sciencenews.org