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Dusty Demise
Featured on April 1, 2019
Twin dust tails stream away from asteroid 6478 Gault, which is more than 200 million miles from the Sun, in this recent image from Hubble Space Telescope. Sunlight has caused the asteroid to spin faster and faster over the past 100 million years. Today, it completes one turn every two hours. At that rate, pockets of dust can be spun off the asteroid's surface and hurled into space. The longer of the two streamers in this view is about 500,000 miles (800,000 km) long. [NASA/ESA/K. Meech and J. Kleyna (Univ. Hawaii)/O. Hainaut (ESO)]
