The smacked asteroid’s debris trail is more than 6,000 miles long. Thousands of kilometers of debris are now trailing the asteroid that was hit by a NASA probe.
The telescope in Chile allowed astronomers to record pictures from millions of kilometers away. The National Science Foundation laboratory in Arizona disclosed their surprising discovery two days following last month’s planetary defense test.
Dust and other debris ejected from the impact crater can be seen growing into a comet-like tail more than 6,000 miles (10,000 kilometers) long in the picture.
Matthew Knight of the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory and Teddy Kareta of Lowell Observatory used the Southern Astrophysical Research Telescope to make the discovery. Knight noted that the plume is largely accelerating away from the harmless asteroid due to pressure on it from solar radiation.
Scientists predict the tail will grow much longer and spread out more, eventually becoming so flimsy that it is invisible.
“At that point, the material will be like any other dust floating around the solar system,” Knight wrote in an email on Tuesday.
Dimorphos is a 525-foot (160-meter) moonlet of a bigger asteroid, and further studies are expected to discover how much and what sort of debris was ejected from it.
The Dart spacecraft, launched by NASA over a year before, was destroyed in the impact. The purpose of the $325 million expedition to divert an asteroid’s orbit was to practice for the day when a deadly boulder would be headed our way. According to NASA, Dimorphos and its companion rock have never and will never be dangerous to Earth.
