© : NASA, ESA, D. Jewitt (UCLA)
This Hubble Space Telescope image, shows the slow migration of building-size fragments of Comet 332P/Ikeya-Murakami over a three-day period in January 2016. The pieces broke off of the main nucleus in late 2015 as the icy, ancient comet approached the sun in its orbit.
As a comet approaches the Sun, it heats up and begins to
outgas, causing jets of gas and dust to erupt from its surface. These jets can sometimes act like tiny rocket engines, spinning up the comet's rotation and loosening chunks of material that drift off into space.
Over the span of three days in January 2016, the
Hubble Space Telescope captured detailed images of just that scenario happening to Comet 332P/Ikeya-Murakami, or Comet 332P, located roughly 67 million miles from Earth.
The Hubble observations revealed 25 building-size blocks made of a mixture of ice and dust that broke off from the comet and are now are scattered along a 3,000-mile-long trail, larger than the width of the continental U.S. The icy chunks comprise about 4 percent of the parent comet and range in size from roughly 65 feet wide to 200 feet wide. They are drifting away from the comet and each other at a few miles per hour, about the walking speed of an adult. See animation
here.
The Hubble observations also reveal that the comet is much smaller than previously thought, measuring only 1,600 feet across, about the length of five football fields.
According to a
NASA statement, these observations provide insight into the volatile behavior of comets as they approach the sun, begin to vaporize, and unleash dynamical forces. Comet 332P was 150 million miles from the sun, slightly beyond the orbit of Mars, when Hubble spotted the breakup.
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