Photograph courtesy Robert McMillan and Jim Scotti, University
of Arizona Published January 21, 2010 A curious, comet-like
object recently found in pictures from a ground-based telescope
might actually be fallout from a high-speed asteroid collision,
planetary scientists report. If these suspicions are confirmed,
the object would represent the first time astronomers have
witnessed the immediate aftermath of such a cosmic smashup.
Dubbed P/2010 A2 (LINEAR), the fuzzy, tailed mystery object is
about 130,000 miles (210,000 kilometers) to 190,000 miles
(305,000 kilometers) long, stretching across part of our solar
system's main asteroid belt. The belt contains thousands of
asteroids that orbit between Mars and Jupiter, some 250 million
miles (402 million kilometers) from Earth. It's believed most
comets come from the cold, distant reaches of the solar system
and travel on long, elliptical orbits, which keep the icy bodies
far from the sun most of the time. As a comet nears the sun,
heat turns the comet's volatile