Wednesday, February 03, 2010

Odder And Odder

A space object spotted by the Hubble space telescope has a geometric pattern on its rear end:


And what's that bright point of light?

We are told that this may be the result of a collision of two asteroids at a closing velocity of five times that of a speeding bullet.

Show me the math behind that conclusion.

4 comments:

TheWayfarer said...

Now, if I were the typical NattyEnq-reading, mullet-sporting, Coke-bottle-glassed, weed-smoking retread from the 60s, I'd start suspecting little green men from Alpha-Centauri by this point...
I'm actually just thankful they ran into eachother at hundreds of thousands of milesan hour, instead of the Earth!

Bob Harrison said...

Fascinating.

Astrosmith said...

Yep, this pic has me going "WTF?"

Though, MAYBE, that cross pattern is debris from the two colliding asteroids spreading out along their original flight paths. The bright dot may be the largest resulting body from the collision, and all the dust is the rest of the two former asteroids. But I don't know for sure.

Bob said...

Two Bobs now...

I'm the older one.