Asteroids may shoot pebbles into shallow temporary orbits, boffins believe
In 2019, scientists clocked something they'd never seen before: an asteroid named Bennu appeared to be popping off swarms of pebbles. Research published Thursday may go some way to explain why.
The pebbles were observed by NASA's Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security, Regolith Explorer mission. Scientists investigating the pebble phenomenon considered the Aguas Zarcas meteorite – a lump of space rock that landed in Costa Rica in 2019. The University of Chicago's Philip Heck and his graduate student Xin Yang noticed Aguas Zarcas didn't break up after being frozen in liquid nitrogen and thawed with warm water.
The pair decided to find out why it held together so well. Using CT scans they discovered that pebbles within the rock were spherical and aligned – as if some process had deformed them all in the same way in its previous life as a part of an asteroid. But whatever that process was, it didn't affect the rest of the rock.
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