 
 
 Nov. 7, 2013: Astronomers viewing our solar system's asteroid belt with NASA's Hubble Space Telescope have seen for the first time an asteroid with six comet-like tails of dust. P/2013 P5 appeared as an unusually fuzzy-looking object. ANALYSIS: Hubble’s Bizarre X-Shaped Slow-Motion Asteroid Collision 
 
 Apart from the fact that P5 appears to have jets of gas and dust projecting in all directions — like spokes on a bicycle wheel — between the Sept. 10 and Sept. 23, “the entire structure had swung around,” writes a Hubble science news release. “We were literally dumbfounded when we saw it,” said David Jewitt, lead investigator from the University of California at Los Angeles. “Even more amazingly, its tail structures change dramatically in just 13 days as it belches out dust. That also caught us by surprise. It’s hard to believe we’re looking at an asteroid.” 
 
 So what is it? Asteroids are known to be affected by the sun’s radiation — like their cometary cousins, they heat up. Astronomers will continue observing P/2013 P5 to see whether the dust leaves the asteroid in the equatorial plane. Careful modeling by team member Jessica Agarwal of the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research in Lindau, Germany, showed that the tails could have been formed by a series of impulsive dust-ejection events. “The sun then drags this dust into the distinct tails we’re seeing.” 
 
 GALLERY: The Most Mind-Blowing Space Spirals 
 
 The space rock, which measures up to 240 meters wide, has probably only lost about 100-1000 tons of dust — a tiny fraction of its total mass. “In astronomy, where you find one, you eventually find a whole bunch more,” said Jewitt. “This is just an amazing object to us, and almost certainly the first of many more to come.” 
 
 Jewitt’s team has published a paper describing this fascinating object in the Nov. 7 issue of The Astrophysical Journal Letters (doi:10.1088/2041-8205/778/1/L21).
– The Hubble telescope has spotted a spectacular, perplexing object in the middle of the Asteroid Belt: a rock with six "comet-like" dust tails streaming behind it. "We were literally dumbfounded when we saw it," David Jewitt, the head of the astronomy team studying the P/2013 P5, said in a NASA release. "Even more amazing, its tail structures change dramatically in just 13 days as it belches out dust. That also caught us by surprise. It's hard to believe we're seeing an asteroid." The team hypothesizes that the sun's radiation set the 260-yard-wide rock spinning—thanks, Discovery explains, to the Yarkovsky-O'Keefe-Radzievskii-Paddack effect—so quickly that it lost structural integrity. Using modeling, one team member calculated six dates when the asteroid likely ejected dust into space. So far, it has likely ejected as much as 1,000 tons of dust into space, but that's still a tiny fraction of its mass. "This is just an amazing object to us, and almost certainly the first of many," Jewitt says. "In astronomy, when you find one, you eventually find a whole bunch more."