“on the timescales involved in this event, we’re really catching it in the moment of happening”
When the comet-like asteroid P/2010 A2 was identified as a suspected asteroid-asteroid collision in January this year it was the first such collision caught “in the act”. Images Credit: NASA, ESA, and D. Jewitt (UCLA). As the BBC notes, subsequent observations by the Hubble Space Telescope and the Rosetta probe suggest that the collision probably occurred in early 2009. Here’s a sequence of Hubble observations from January to May 2010, with scale. As the associated text explains The asteroid debris, dubbed P/2010 A2, appears to be …