Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

CTOnews.com, July 23 (Xinhua)-- NASA conducted a space experiment last year when it hit an asteroid with a probe, which not only changed the asteroid's orbit, but also blew dozens of boulders into space.

According to CTOnews.com, the purpose of the experiment is to test a way to prevent future asteroids from hitting Earth. NASA directed the DART probe to an asteroid called Dimorphos, which is the moon of another larger asteroid, Didymos. Three months after the impact, the Hubble Space Telescope observed 37 previously undiscovered objects orbiting the sun with the asteroids. The study was published in the July 21 issue of the Astrophysical Journal KuaiBao.

Simulations show that these objects are not fragments that were shattered on impact, but boulders that bounced completely out of the Dimorphos. They may be energy generated by the impact or seismic waves propagated inside the Dimorphos after the impact are thrown from the surface. However, David Juyt, a planetary astronomer at the University of California, Los Angeles, said, "there is still a lot of uncertainty in this simulation."

Based on the brightness of these objects, they are one of the darkest objects observed by Hubble in the solar system, and Juyt and colleagues estimate that the boulders may be 7 meters wide and at least 15 objects are more than 4 meters wide. The researchers calculated that the boulders weighed about 5 million kilograms, equivalent to the weight of 300 trucks full of rubble.

Hubble made several observations of these objects and found that they escaped slightly faster than the asteroid system at an average speed of 1 km per hour away from Dimorphos and Didymos--. So these boulders, and more small stones that may exist but Hubble can't see, will eventually get out of the orbit of the asteroid system and orbit around the sun, Juyt said.

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