14 DAY TRIAL // Some asteroids really wanted to be comets when they grew up and a few of them actually manage to pull it off, to a degree. A rather unusual asteroid was revealed to have a much, much longer tail than previously thought.
An asteroid with a tail like a comet, is unusual enough, but one with a tail that stretches one million kilometers (620,000 miles), twice the distance between the Earth and the moon, is very rare.
However, it is an asteroid and not a comet. The tail, while huge, was revealed to be made up of dust and small chunks of rock, perhaps one centimeter across, and not gas as would be found in a comet's tail.
Astronomers now believe that this particular asteroid, P/2010 A2, sports a tail because it was hit by a much smaller asteroid a few years ago. The smaller asteroid is believed to be 3 to 5 meters long (10 to 16 feet) while the larger one, which left the huge trail, to be about 120 meters (390 feet) long.
The high speed collision had the same energy as an atomic bomb and completely disintegrated the smaller asteroid. It also shattered the larger ones resulting in the long debris tail.
