After the asteroid collided with DART, it became like a comet. Scientists have shown what it looks like

Two days after the DART probe hit the asteroid, astronomers Teddy Carriage of the Lowell Observatory and Matthew Knight

from the US Naval Academy observed a huge plume of dust and debris thrown from the surface of Didymos.

For observations, scientists used a 4.1-meterSouthern Astrophysical Research Telescope (SOAR) at NSF NOIRLab's Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile. In the new image, you can see a dust trail—an outburst pushed aside by the pressure of solar radiation. It is not much different from the tail of a comet and stretches from the center to the right edge of the field of view. The astronomers also used a high-performance Goodman spectrograph for observations.

Photo: National Science Foundation/NOIRLab

“It’s amazing how clearly we were able toto record the structure and the scale of the consequences in the first days after the impact,” noted one of the astronomers. Scientists plan to continue using SOAR to monitor emissions in the coming weeks and months.

They will allow scientists to learn moreabout the nature of the surface of Dimorphos, about how much material was ejected during the collision, how quickly it happened, and also about the distribution of particle sizes in the expanding dust cloud.

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