Did you see this Hubble picture of an asteroid collision?
Yes, that was Wednesday's Astronomy Picture of the Day. (Poor asteroid, it was Wednesday's child!)
The caption to the APOD picture says that two asteroids may have smashed into one another at more than 15,000 kilometers an hour, more than five times the speed of a rifle bullet. That is some head-on collision! The bulls-eye would have released more energy than a nuclear bomb. What we see is the 140 meter nucleus of one of the bodies involved in the collision, plus an enormous tail of debris.
Ann
