This Asteroid Was Spotted Changing Colours For The First Time!
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Asteroids aren’t supposed to leave dusty trails behind them, nor are they supposed to have colour-changing abilities. But Asteroid 6478 is going all the and carving a niche for itself!
Gault was discovered last December and labelled as an active asteroid that left not one, but two trails behind it, just like a comet. Now, the same asteroid has been caught switching colours, from red to blue in near-infrared spectrum by astronomers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), United States. This is the first time in the history of extraterrestrial materials that that astronomers have seen any shift in colours in an asteroid.
So, what caused Gault to change colours? MIT astronauts assume that it’s the upper layer of the asteroid that has turned red after years of exposure to the Sun. They initially thought that the outer dusty layer withered away as the asteroid spun. A part of the MIT team at the Department of Earth, Atmosphere and Plan, Michael Marsset told Business Insider that about 10 per cent of asteroids spin very fast, meaning with a two-to three-hour rotation period, and it’s most likely due to the Sun spinning them up.
Gault now glows in a blue tinge as a result of a less irradiated layer of the asteroid coming to light. According to the study’s co-author DeMeo, a change in the spectrum can be achieved with only a thin layer being removed. "It could be as thin as a single layer of grains just microns deep,” he explained.
The thing with Gault is that it is a rocky asteroid, found within the asteroid belt, between Mars and Jupiter. It’s a relatively average rock measuring around four kilometres that orbits the Sun from 344 million kilometers away. Now most comets are typically just loose bundles of ice and dust originating from cooler regions in the solar system. As they approach the Sun, they start getting hotter and their surface starts to melt away. The melting ice is what creates the comet’s characteristic tail.
Marrset speculates that there is probably some mechanism responsible for dust emission is different from comets, and different from most other active, main-belt asteroids.
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Cover Credits: NASA
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