Contains:  Solar system body or event
Asteroid 6478 Gault self destructing, lowenthalm

Asteroid 6478 Gault self destructing

Asteroid 6478 Gault self destructing, lowenthalm

Asteroid 6478 Gault self destructing

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Description

I read about asteroid Gault coming apart and developing a tail after being spun up beyond its grabity's ability to hold it together by the Yarkovsky effect. Thought I would try some comet imaging tricks to see if I could see anything. Here is the result!

I took several short exposures of 3s, live-stacked into 1 minute stacks and then stacked 16 of these aligned on the comet for a total of 16 minutes, which produced the star streaks. The actual period over which the images were taken was more like 40 minutes. The inset detail makes it easier to see some features like the little fan of material coming downward out of the asteroid and the gap between the tail and the asteroid - almost looks like there is the little tail takes a looping arc out of the asteroid before joining the longer tail. This would have been easier and produced better images from a dark sky site. The tail looks a lot more ragged than it does in the images in the article link below. Those are better images, of course, but they were also taken a while ago, so the activity may be different now.

The other fuzzy blobs are faint 16th and 17th PGC galaxies in the field of view. The asteroid is about 17th magnitude here.

Good article on it here:

https://gizmodo.com/wildly-spinning-asteroid-caught-in-the-throes-of-self-d-1833647635

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