Contains:  Solar system body or event
Asteroid 6478 Gault, Erik Westermann

Asteroid 6478 Gault

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Description

This is asteroid 6478 Gault. It’s about 3.7 km wide and has the unusual feature of a tail. Images of this object before November 2018 show it without a tail and it is thought that this asteroid impacted another asteroid resulting in the ejection of material from its surface.

In case it’s not clear in this image, the asteroid is in the upper-left and moving toward the right. There’s a white speck in the image that’s also moving around in the vicinity – this is an image artifact.

I processed this image using AstroImageJ and used it to create the animated GIF.

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