The Mysterious Exploding Asteroid
A NASA spacecraft reached a space rock and found it orbited by tiny moons—a phenomenon that “has never been seen before in any solar-system object.”
Billions of years ago, something—perhaps the vibrations of an exploding star—jostled a cloud of cosmic gas and dust suspended in space. The cloud collapsed on itself and flattened into a spinning disk. The center grew heavy and ignited, forming our sun. The stuff that remained ricocheted, collided, and congealed. The biggest clumps of space stuff smoothed into spheres—the planets and moons. The smallest, the asteroids and comets, stayed as they were, like crumbs left over from an elaborate feast.
And right now one of those crumbs is exploding.
