Dimorphos' much larger companion asteroid Didymos is spinning so fast that it's capable of ejecting pieces of rubble into deep space.
published earlier this month, a team of planetary scientists suggest that Didymos may be releasing a steady stream of rubble and dust off of its equator as it rotates every two hours and 16 minutes.
In simulations, a team led by co-author Adriano Campo Bagatin, a planetary scientist at the University of Alicante in Spain, found that while 97 percent of material that comes off Didymos' surface falls back within around four hours, other larger pieces eventually land on Dimorphos.That kind of ejection could be a much larger trend among asteroids, with countless space rocks filling the cosmos with stray smaller pieces of debris as they spin.
In fact, it could give us even more pertinent clues as to how planets and other celestial bodies are formed in the first place. Astronomers are now investigating whether Dimorphos was formed in the first place as a result of Didymos flinging dust and bits of rock off its surface. Fortunately, the European Space Agency will soon be getting a much closer look to confirm this hypothesis. The plan is to launch a spacecraft, dubbed
, sometime next year to rendezvous with the binary asteroid system and study how the asteroids' surfaces change over time — a meeting that may prove riskier for the spacecraft than initially thought due to the potential of stray debris.
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