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Video: Hubble telescope captures asteroid disintegrating

NASA calls the photos the "first pictures of a disintegrating asteroid."

Other telescopes noticed the activity between Mars and Jupiter, prompting NASA to concentrate the Hubble on the area.

Discovery says watching asteroid P/2013 R3 fall apart in front of their eyes was "probably one of the strangest" things the telescope has ever captured.

One thing surprising the scientists was how slowly the space rock is disintegrating.

As it began to break up researches could see 10 distinct chunks flying apart at a not very impressive 1.5 kilometers per hour.

Lead investigator David Jewitt of UCLA called it “a really bizarre thing to observe.

We've never seen anything like it before." Scientists are curious about what caused the rock to come apart.

They don’t believe it was a crash, but they guess it was something called the YORP effect.

USA Today describes it as "a subtle effect from sunlight that can change the asteroid’s rotation rate and basically cause a rubbly-type asteroid to spin apart."

More here.

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